speech balloon

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C onversation is a basic element in the medium of comics, where much of the narrative appeal is derived from the interplay between dialogue and action. The speech balloon, a favoured visual symbol for voice and utterance in the medium since the mid-­twentieth century, has become a symbol for comics. In Italian, famously, the word fumetto —the word for a speech or thought balloon—also refers to the art form itself, whether in the form of a comic strip or a comic book. In fact, dialogue is such a central feature in the medium that it may sometimes be difficult to think of it as a distinct element. A character who speaks his thoughts aloud when apparently nobody is listening is a much­-used convention, and many comics, for instance, ‘talking heads’ or humoristic comic strips that deliver a verbal gag, focus on speaking. Perhaps paradoxically, dialogue scenes may be more distinguishable when their use is more restricted, for instance, in comics when action is predominant and only occasionally interrupted by a scene of talk or when first­-person verbal narration is predominant, as in autobiographical comics that occasionally lapse into dialogue.

The reason for the popularity of the dialogue form in comics is at least partly related to medium-­specific constraints and affordances that encourage its use and, concomitantly, restrict the employment of more indirect forms of speech and thought representation. In contrast with dialogue, forms of indirect discourse, such as free indirect discourse or the narratorial reporting of a character’s speech, tend to demand more space for words. Conventional strategies for distinguishing between these modes of verbal narration have included their visual form and placement in relation to the images. The dichotomy between narrato­rial voice in caption boxes and dialogue or other forms of direct speech in text balloons is not always clear-­cut, let alone all-­inclusive. Speech in comics can also occur in captions, verbal narration can take place in text balloons, the narrator’s and the character’s voices may intermingle, 1 and neither verbal narration nor direct speech or thought must be placed in boxes or balloons. Moreover, text in comics can occur outside these two categories in the image background or as part of the image. However, the continued assertion of the difference between direct speech and other modes of verbal narration in comics also needs to be taken into consideration as an important convention in the medium.

This chapter focusses on the dialogue form as a key narrative device and technique, and it examines the main compositional principles and narrative functions that characterize conversational scenes in comics. The starting point in this investigation is the multimodal character of speech and conversational exchange in comics. This requires us to focus on the interaction between the utterance and the elements of the image. Thus, on the one hand, I will discuss the ways in which dialogue, in the form of written speech, interacts with what is shown in the image, such as the interlocutors’ facial expressions, gestures, body language, and other visual cues of mental states and participant involvement. Furthermore, this necessitates an investigation of the visual possibilities and expressive functions of typography, the graphic style of writing, onomatopoeia or imitatives, 2 visual symbols, and standalone non­letter marks in the written rendering of conversation. On the other hand, I will discuss the function of speech balloons as metaphors for an utterance—‘utterance’ meaning here a specific piece of dialogue—voice, and turn-­taking, and their narrative role in organising the time of the speech event and the order of its reading. Utterances in comics are characterised by their dual role as both instances of imagined speech in the world of the story and written language to be read. As to their latter function, it must be taken into account that readers of comics need to process the relations between the various utterances both in a single panel, when it includes several utterances, and between the panels in order to create a sense of a continuous conversation. Finally, I will briefly discuss some strategic uses of contrast and emphasis between visual and verbal narration in speech representation in comics.

The ultimate goal of this chapter is to develop a medium-­specific understanding of the dialogue form in comics and outline the basic narrative functions of scenes of talk in comics. In this investigation, different examples will be drawn from innovative uses of dialogue in this medium. The subject is admittedly very broad. Within the bounds of this chapter, I can merely hope to highlight the main features of interest in this crucial and often central form in comics.

The Embodied Speech Situation in Comics

Given the multimodal nature of the medium and the importance of visual showing in comics, the question of dialogue in comics requires us to think of the areas of interaction between the image content, such as the portrayal of the participants in the conversational scene, the utterance that is placed in the image, and the main formal aspects of the composition, such as panel relations and the page layout. First, let us consider the ways in which the participants in such scenes are visually shown to be engaged in the speech situation by means of non­verbal communication. Such means include, especially, facial expression, posture, hand gesture, eye contact (or gaze), and the expressive distortion of the interlocutors’ bodies.

Existing research on the gesture­-utterance connection in comics suggests that the use of gestures as signs of emotion largely follows real­-life models in everyday speech situations (Fein and Kasher 1996; Forceville 2005). Both in everyday real-­life conversation and comics, body language and posture are elemental communicative resources. At the same time, however, research has also suggested that in comics, since they commonly simplify and exaggerate bodily forms through caricature, the speaker’s and the recipient’s gestures often have a more prominent role than in real life (see Forceville 2005, 85; Fein and Kasher 1996, 795). In particular, facial expressions that are based on elemental features, such as eyebrows, eyes, gaze, mouth, furrows, and wrinkles, or the head position, are conventionally exploited as signs of emotion, thought, attitude, and stance. Similarly, speech in comics, while it may seek to be verisimilar and can provide the linguist with useful examples of spoken language, can take on wilfully distorted forms, such as simplification or exaggeration, that are different from uses of spoken language in real­-life speech situations. 3 As dialogue in comics also necessarily has a written form and often an ostentatiously graphic and handwritten quality, the study of speech in comics needs to be sensitive to graphic features and the visual effects of written language.

Rodolphe Töpffer, who many see as the inventor of modern comics, claimed in his essay “Essai de physiognomonie” (1845) that a graphic trace has unique expressive potential, especially in relation to the drawing of a human face. For Töpffer, all faces in drawings, however, naively or poorly completed, even in the form of simple scribbling, possess a fixed expression. He further surmised that the viewer can recognize such expressions without education, knowledge of art, or any experience in drawing a face. 4 Similarly, one of the basic tenets in today’s psychological research in face recognition is that people identify faces from very little information. In such identification, as in recognizing an emotional expression, the eyes and eyebrows are among the most salient regions to pay attention to, followed by the mouth and the nose (Sadrô et al. 2003; Sinha et al. 2005). Töpffer saw, similarly, that in order for the drawing of a face to be effective, one needs to focus only on a limited number of key aspects, such as the eyes, eyebrows, nose, nostril(s), chin, forehead, wrinkles or folds of skin, and the shape of the head. 5 Töpffer also thought that the relation between these facial features and the person’s posture—the form of his or her upper body, gestures, and attitudes— mattered, even though he did not see them as important as the internal features of a face (the eyes, nose, and mouth).

As recent psychological and sociological conversation analysis has shown, facial expressions can enhance or disambiguate the speaker’s and the recipient’s stances towards what is being said in real-­life speech situations (Ruusuvuori and Peräkylä 2009). In comics, likewise, a basic element of speech representation is the relation between verbal utterances, facial expressions, and other features of body language such as eye contact, typically accompanied by the sense of perspective and field of vision that are inscribed in the image. For instance, a way of speaking and listening can be revealed by an exchange of looks in subsequent gaze images, images portraying someone looking at something or someone, or reaction images, that is, images showing someone’s reaction to something that is said. A recipient’s look can, for instance, indicate pensiveness, concentration, or confusion, affiliation with the topic or the speaker, the sharing of an understanding, or the rejection of an idea, or it can reveal what is important and salient in the conversation situation as a whole. 6

Notice, for instance, the significance of facial expression, gaze, body language, and hand gestures in this scene from Abel Lanzac and Christophe Blain’s Quai D’Orsay. Chroniques diplomatiques II ( Weapons of Mass Diplomacy 2012), which depicts a meeting between the French Minister of Foreign Affairs, Alexandre Taillard de Vorms (inspired by Dominique de Villepin), his speech writer Arthur Vlaminck, and a representative of the logistics department, Gilles Mande (Figure 9.1). In this scene, the furious minister protests to Mande about not being able to have a bigger aeroplane (Airbus) for himself and his advisors on a diplomatic visit to Russia. The intensity of the minister’s gaze and his facial expression, emphasised in the close­up image framed to show only his piercing eyes and part of his gigantic nose, convey the persistence of his stance, as well as his manipulative attitude towards the others. The minister pours forth a tirade of complaints, evidently fuelled by a sense of self­-importance, about the tightness of space in the smaller Falcon aircraft that has been offered to him and his staff. All this is accompanied by expressive and manipulative hand gestures.

Besides facial expressions and gaze, hands, hand gestures, and arm positions can also have a significant function in speech situations in comics, communicating meaning themselves or specifying the words’ meaning. Two likely reasons for the significance of hands in comics are that we can gesture meaningfully and simulate shapes and things much more accurately with our hands than with other body parts, and that they can relatively easily be drawn to demonstrate this. 7 Hand gestures may be used as forms of illustration, specifying a type of action, a spatial relation, or a physical shape of something, or as a form of emphasis, while a hand can also point to an object, place, or the interlocutor. Waving, pointing, and beckoning can have a conversational function, for instance, as an expression of the participant’s emotion, attitude, and personality, and also as a conversational signal. The salience of hand gestures in the image, or facial expressions, for that matter, can be further emphasised by means of layout, perspective, foregrounding, or visual means of emphasis.

Figure 9.1   Abel Lanzac and Christophe Blain Weapons of Mass Diplomac y (2012/2014). Trans. Edward Gauvin © 2014 SelfMadeHero.

The meaning of the participants’ positions in an interaction, and what psychology calls (inter)personal space behaviour or proxemics—how people use the personal space around them as they interact with others— can be effectively portrayed in comics by showing how participants in a scene of talk take their space or relate to each other and the surrounding environment. Focus on a particular person in a close­up image or framing the image close to a participant or his or her field of vision may also suggest a (narratorial) sense of proximity to that participant. 8 This is also common in film narratives. A more medium-­specific aspect of significant body language in comics is the non­realistic manipulation and distortion of body shapes through caricature, that is, the relative malleability of the drawn body. We can observe this, for instance, in the above example from Weapons of Mass Diplomacy where Alexandre Taillard de Vorms’s shoulders and nose change their proportional size from panel to panel. The speaker’s body is thus modified to reflect his speech, attitude, and personality; the body has an expressive function in itself.

Conversational scenes in comics, as in film narration, have an advantage over dialogue scenes in literature in that they may show various non­verbal communication cues, which co­occur with verbal communication and can combine the effect of such cues. All visually observable aspects of non­verbal communication that may be integrated in a face­-to-­face dialogue in real life can also be portrayed in comics: facial expression, posture, gesture, eye contact, touch, adornment, physiological responses, position and spatial relations, personal space, locomotion, and setting. 9 While comics, at least in the traditional forms of printed strips or books, cannot usually represent sounds, they have developed various ways of suggesting auditory signals and vocal behaviour, such as onomatopoeia, sound effects, and symbols. All these cues are potentially relevant in conversational scenes in comics, where they co­occur with the verbal utterance. As they interact with each other and the utterance, these devices help the reader to create a sense of a continuing speech event, or what is meant by what is said; better perceive the participant’s mental state, attitude, and intention; and grasp the nature of the relation between the speakers. Yet, the ways in which cartoonists may take advantage of the rich possibilities of non­verbal communication in the medium vary greatly. For instance, while facial expressions are generally important, from children’s comic strips to adult-­oriented graphic novels, or from superhero comics to nonfiction reportage, some cartoonists also simplify facial expression cues or minimise their use. 10 Thus, the varying aspects of non­verbal communication, and in some cases even facial expressions, can be conceived of as optional tools of visual showing and narration in conversational scenes.

Symbols of the Speaker’s Mental State and Engagement

In much comics storytelling, the use of visual symbols and verbal­-visual signs that emanate from the characters may also contribute significantly to speech representation and dialogue scenes. In the passage of Weapons of Mass Diplomacy above, Mande’s heavy sweating, shown with drops of sweat, his changing facial skin colour, and later also his gradually shrinking head and body clearly point out his submission to the minister’s authority. The visual symbols around his head, which the cartoonist Mort Walker has called ‘emanata’ and John M. Kennedy identified as ‘pictorial runes’ (1982, 600), 11 portray emotions (agony), mental states, and an internal condition (submission). These and similar graphic devices, such as drops of sweat or more symbolic signs such as wiggly lines, starbursts, circles, halos, and clouds, often have little or no relation to the outer signs of emotion and attitude in real­-life speech situations. As conventions that are used in modern narrative drawings from cartoons to comics, emanata are metonymically motivated signs that result from a character’s emotion and thought or some immediate sensory stimuli and effect. Typically, they specify the force of the speech act, a speaker’s enthusiasm or uncertainty, the recipient’s understanding or lack of understanding of what is said, acceptance and disappointment, or, as here, gradual submission to the speaker. Emanata and altered body shapes can also portray types of perception and reactions, including the sense of cold and warmth, smell, newness, light, and brightness or perceptions of speed, reflection, sudden or fast movement (speed lines), the direction of movement, or surprise and suspense. Not all comics employ them, but when they are used, they can contribute significantly to our understanding of the other elements in a scene of talk such as facial expression, gestures, and gaze.

Beyond the emanata, or pictorial runes, conversational scenes in comics can also comprise various other signs, including stand­alone punctuation marks, 12 pictograms, 13 sound effects, imitatives, and onomatopoeia 14 that have similar or related functions. Placed in the space in the image around the characters, or possibly continuing from panel to panel, these signs can equally specify the characters’ emotions, thoughts, and attitudes or a way of acting, behaving, and speaking; clarify what is said; or express movement, sounds, and other sensory stimuli that are relevant in the scene.

Comics imitatives, which are widely used for humorous purposes, approximate non­linguistic sounds and action or contact between the characters, as well as attitude, emotion, sensations, and movement by adapting them to the phonemic system of the language. Onomatopoeia and sound words (or descriptive sound effects), which can be regarded as a specific case of imitatives, represent sound and voice in verbal form and, at the same time, often aim for a visual effect, which in itself can mime some quality of the sound or reflect its source, such as an event causing the sound. Onomatopoeia may also indicate variation in sound effects such as volume, pitch, timbre, and duration. Typically, onomatopoeia fit the phonology of the language in which they are used (‘boom!’, ‘wham!’, and ‘whoosh!’ in English or ‘baoum!’, ‘pff!’, and ‘vlan!’ in French). In comics storytelling, however, it is also common that an onomatopoeic adaptation of a sound does not necessarily have to constitute a word or even be pronounceable. Onomatopoeic expressions in comics are not usually reducible to the sound that they imitate—one reason being that they are given a visual, graphic form that contributes to their meaning and effect. The use of stand­alone descriptive words (or descriptive imitatives) for sensations and emotions is also common (‘snort’, ‘gasp’, ‘tickle’, ‘sigh’, etc.).

Stylistic elements of writing, such as lettering, typography, and fonts, as well as what has been called para­ or quasi-­balloonic phenomena, 15 can be incorporated in a dialogue scene for similar purposes. The graphic style in which speech is written is often meaningful in such scenes in two senses. First, the graphic style of writing can create an effect of continuity between the world of the story, or the speech situation, and the written speech. For instance, written speech can be placed and shaped in the image field so that it reflects the visual contents of the image. 16 The graphic line that depicts the speaking figures can also give the impression of continuity in the writing (or vice versa). Second, the style of writing can in itself express certain aspects of the utterance, such as emphasise the meaning of a word, a phrase, or an utterance through bold lettering, convey humour, add a metaphorical or ironic layer through a stylistic change, imply a way of speaking or type of voice (whispering, singing, a broadcast voice, and so on), the intensity of speaking (by changing the letter size, for instance), and the speaker’s attitude or emotional state. It can also portray differences between the speakers’ register, style, or voice. Not all comics use the rich graphic potential of writing in this regard, but the style of writing and the choice of typography are important features of conversational scenes in many comics. Think, for instance, of Walt Kelly’s Pogo , or Neil Gaiman’s The Sandman , where typographical choices may reflect the characters’ personality or attitude, or René Goscinny and Albert Uderzo’s Asterix , where changes in lettering can indicate important vocal and linguistic differences in the characters’ speech (accent, dialect, stylistic register, language). By these means, written dialogue in comics can overcome some of the limitations that affect the representation of spoken language in conventional literary fiction. 17

All in all, the various visual and verbal­visual signs that have become conventionalised in comics can be metaphorically motivated as indexes of a speaker’s emotions, thoughts, attitudes, and perceptions. All these features may also contribute to the meaning of what is said, and potentially influence the reader’s attribution of mental states to characters. Frequently, such signs work together to identify the speaker’s attitude, complementing the meanings of facial expression and body language, and thus specify or enhance the speaker’s relation to the propositional content of the utterance and the other participants in the scene. 18

Let us take as an example the main components of a scene of talk in Finnish cartoonist Aapo Rapi’s (auto)biographical narrative Meti (2008). This story is based on the cartoonist’s interviews with his 80­year­old grandmother Meeri Rapi, known as Meti, but it also has a strong autobiographical dimension: the cartoonist pictures himself in the story, meeting and conversing with his grandmother, taking notes during the conversation, and relates some other events in his life at the time of the interviews and the storytelling. The narrative perspective of Meti is often ambiguous in that there are clues in the story that let the reader think that it is told and illustrated in the way that Aapo imagines the events have happened—Meti’s story would thus be within the frame of Aapo’s imagination—but there are also passages in the narrative where Aapo’s story and Meti’s memories appear to be in competition. At times, the frame narrative and Meti’s narrative also coalesce, resulting in a kind of intersection of stories.

Figure 9.2 Aapo Rapi. Meti (2008) © Aapo Rapi.

Here, in this scene of five panels, the speaker’s and the recipient’s facial expressions, posture, gaze, exchange of looks, perspective, and emanata play a vital role together (Figure 9.2). We first see the cartoonist meeting with his grandmother. When Meti attempts to formally introduce herself with ‘My name is M–’, the cartoonist, visibly frustrated by this introduction—indicated by drops of sweat springing from his face, accompanied by a few drops of coffee spilled from his cup—interrupts her and insists that she should speak as she ‘normally’ does, that is, not in formal discourse. Consider also the importance of gazes and perspective in this scene. Both speakers are present in all images, but seen from different angles and distances. The alternating perspective of the images allows us to see the scene from behind both characters’ shoulders and thus share their viewpoints to some extent. Notice also that the cartoonist’s face is much more expressive of emotion and mental state—changing from signs of haste and frustration to calm—than that of the stony­-faced main character. Moreover, Meti’s large non­reflective glasses are in stark contrast with the youthful expressiveness of her face in the narrated memories that follow this scene.

The Bond between the Speaker and the Utterance

Speech and thought balloons were successfully incorporated into American newspaper comic strips in the 1890s. In earlier European comics and cartoons, the same device had already been widely used, including British satirical broadsheet prints (1770–1820), but in Töpffer’s and in many other mid­-nineteenth-­century European cartoonists’ works, speech was usually represented in captions that were placed underneath the images. Only by the 1940s and the early 1950s did the representation of speech in speech balloons become a dominant convention in the medium in most Western countries. 19 Since then, other options for representing direct speech, such as speech quoted or summarised in captions, have remained in relatively limited use. Many contemporary cartoonists, however, represent utterances without resorting to speech balloons. For instance, in Brecht Evens’s graphic novels and in much of Claire Bretécher’s work, the utterances are simply placed physically close to the speaker in the space of the image, possibly but not necessarily accompanied by a tail that connects the utterance to the vocalizing source.

Regardless of whether comics use the speech balloon format or not, the general principle that an utterance is tied to a source that is shown in the image or to a source that is situated close to what is shown appears to be a default expectation in comics. The tail emanating from the balloon, or in some cases from the text without a frame, makes this association even more evident as it directly points to the source of the utterance. If the speaker is not shown in the image field, the default expectation is that the balloon and the tail indicate that someone is just outside the visible space or is not yet or no longer in the field of vision, or that the source of the utterance is too small or hidden to be seen (see also Force­ville et al . 2010, 69).

Thus, the speech balloon and its tail, which can take a variety of different visual forms, express the contents of the utterance and, at the same time, are visual symbols of a speech act. In the latter function, we need to underscore their metaphorical function, which has something in common with metonymy: the balloon and its tail stand for a speaking voice (or a sound), the place, time, and duration of speaking, and the act of speaking itself. The relationship between the balloon and the speech act can thus be conceptualised as a structure of contiguity where, with the written utterance representing spoken language, the visual form of the speech balloon stands in a metaphorical relation to the source of the voice and, possibly also, to particular aspects of that voice or sound (intonation, for instance). In contrast, thought balloons represent the speaker’s thoughts and inner state. The distinction between speech and thought balloons is not always unambiguous in comics, or their difference may be irrelevant—does it always matter, for instance, whether a person speaks or thinks aloud to himself?—but in general they are distinguished by various visual markers such as the shape of the balloon and the tail or the background colour.

Being a visual metaphor (or metonymy) for a speech act, the balloon and its tail also perform the function of speech tags. In fact, they can realise the speech tag function much more efficiently and economically than any verbs of saying that traditionally introduce an utterance in literary narratives. The function of the tail, specifically, is to identify the speaker in the image. 20 The balloon and its tail not only point out the turn­-taking, the source of the utterance, and the place of the speaker, but often also tell us how someone is speaking—the intonation, intensity, and volume of speech may be reflected in the shape, size, place, or colour of the balloon and its tail—or reveal the speaker’s attitude towards what is being said (linguistic modality). Balloon frame styles, background colour, and tail shapes regularly depict emotional states and sensory experiences (uncertainty, (dis)approval, ‘warm’, ‘icy’), a type of voice (electronically relayed, distant, shrill, high, low, harsh, broken, and so on), or volume (loud, quiet, shout, whisper). Lettering, typography, and visual signs inside the balloon can have similar functions or can amplify them. If in the Asterix albums typography can be a sign of a different language and dialect; in Brecht Evens’ graphic narratives, the colour of the text identifies the speaker ( The Wrong Place , 2009; The Making Of , 2011; Panthère , 2014).

The expressive uses of the speech balloon are well known to comics readers and scholars, but perhaps less to academics who study the dialogue form across media. Charles Forceville has shown how different visual variables of comics balloons—contour form, colour, fonts, non­verbal contents, and tail use—contribute narratively salient information, for instance, with regard to the manner and topic of speaking or the identity of the speaker (2013, 258, 268). In other words, the visual variables of the balloon, especially in more nonstandard cases, make salient something in what is said, how something is said, or who the speaker is. This, again, requires that we evaluate the relation of the bal­loonic narrative information to the speaker and the speech situation as a whole. The place of the balloon in the scene or the breakdown may also be significant. Thierry Groensteen, who has made a theoretically grounded description of speech balloon functions in comics, has suggested that the place of the balloon is always relative to three different elements in the space of the page: the character who is speaking (the speaker), the frame of the panel, and the neighbouring balloons  (situated in the same panel or a contiguous one) (2007, 75). Groensteen empha­sises, in particular, the interdependence between the characters and the balloons (2007, 75, 83), claiming that their relationship is so strong that they form a sort of functional binomial, a bipolar structure that is a necessary organising device in comics. Moreover, Groensteen presumes that the characters in the panels are the most salient piece of information and, subsequently, echoing Töpffer, that the character’s face and physiognomic expression are the principal focal points of the reader’s attention (2007, 75–76). In reading comics, then, the reader would supposedly first view the character’s face and expression, and then adjust this information, reciprocally, with what is said, that is, the character’s represented speech. 21

The claim about the bipolar structure between an utterance and an utterer seems highly relevant with regard to most comics. The psychological study of face recognition has also proven that the human (biological) visual system starts with a rudimentary preference for face-­like patterns, and that our visual system has unique cognitive and neural mechanisms for face processing (see Sinha et al . 2005). Yet, it seems worth asking whether the functional binomial between the speaker and the utterance is always dominant in guiding the cartoonist’s or the reader’s understanding of conversational scenes, or the order of their reading. For one thing, we still cannot say much that is not controversial about the reader’s order of attention in reading comics. Do we always start reading comics by viewing the characters’ faces? 22 Comics can vary greatly with regard to the relative amount of words they use, as well as for what purpose they use them (what kind of information is given verbally), let alone that the image­-word ratio typically alternates within any given story. A dialogue scene can portray the participants’ positions, gestures, and relations in great detail, but in a ‘talking heads’ story or a verbal gag strip, words can also be the primary focus of the reader’s attention, whereas sometimes faces can tell next to nothing.

In addition, comics can successfully sever the relation between the speaker, words, and space of the speech situation by various means. This may be done, for instance, by excluding the speaker from the space of the image or the narrative level, by multiplying the number of speakers or utterances, and by making the connection between an utterance and a speaker ambivalent in the space of the image. 23 The relation between the utterance and the vocalising source may remain deliberately ambivalent, for instance, in panels where there is only speech and the characters are not seen, or not clearly seen, such as in panoramic images where the speaking figures may be shown far in the distance or are not visible at all, or in images where the vocalising agent is visually blocked. François Ayroles’s strip “Feinte Trinité”, which includes only speech balloons and no figures, pertaining to a conversation between a son, a father, a mother, and God, or the online comic strip Bande pas dessinée , challenges the basic bipolar structure further by never letting us see who is speaking.

Another challenge to the bipolar structure arises from the speaker’s ambivalent positioning between the picture space and outside it. In some rare cases, the speaker can also remain systematically absent from the images. Consider, for instance, the continuous commentator track in Altan’s Ada (1979) where a speaker, who is never seen, is emotionally involved in the narrative as its commentator and viewer. Much more common is that a voice may, once connected with a particular speaker, become disconnected from that speaker on the visual level of narration. This may occur, for instance, when utterances are superimposed on what is seen in the images, thus suggesting that what is seen is the character’s subjective vision. Towards the end of the frame narrative of World’s End , the Chaucerian story arc in The Sandman series, the voices of a group of characters at an inn called World’s End are superimposed in speech balloons on a double spread with images of an enlarging window pane through which they apparently look at a spectral funeral procession in the sky. The reader, thus, is invited to share their field of vision through the dialogue.

Still other challenges to the rule of the bipolar structure of speech in comics include the multiplication of speakers for one utterance and the use of one speaker as a representative of a group of speakers. For instance, Martin Cendreda’s one­-page story, “I want you to like me”, experiments with this principle by letting a conversation continue from panel to panel while the speakers and their spaces keep changing  (Chapter 3). This creates the effect of a communal mind that apparently thinks the same thought, and says the same thing, irrespective of the individual sources of utterance seen in the images (speakers, billboard, dogs). Similarly, ideas apparently voiced by one person can be attributed to a group of people. 24 A character’s voice may also occur in many parts of one panel. This can emphasise, for instance, the speaker’s quick movement, the effects of an echo, or the complexities of space, as happens in Asterix and the Banquet when the Gaul Jellibabix, who is not seen in the panel, says ‘Here!’ in six different corners of the maze­like alleyways of Lugdunum (modern­-day Lyon) seemingly at the same time.

All these cases experiment with the basic expectations of speech representation in comics: an utterance is visually tied to a particular speaker, and both the utterance and the speaker belong to the space that is seen in the panel. Yet as the exceptions above show, the bipolar structure between the speaker and the utterance can always be modified, challenged, and even discarded. The exceptions make the rule more visible, but the flexibility of the structure also points out that, to better understand speech representation and dialogue in comics, it is crucial to think beyond the speaker-­utterance relation to a number of other seminal elements of dialogue in the medium.

Still another important feature of conversational scenes in comics is the interaction between the utterance, the contents of the image and narrative captions. Narrative captions, which are typically distinguished from speech balloons by their frames, background colour, or typography, can also complement, evaluate, or interpret the speech acts presented in the images. In Daniel Clowes’s first-­person narrative Mister Wonderful (2011), the contrasted and sometimes competing thought captions and speech balloons of the story make clearly visible the expected interrelations between the captions and the balloons. Here, the narrator’s thoughts, placed in square-­shaped captions with a yellow background, are frequently superimposed on speech balloons that contain the narrator’s own speech or other people’s utterances, thus indicating, among other things, the narrator’s lack of attention to what is being said. On a few occasions, the speech balloons are also superimposed on the captions, thus suggesting that what is said interrupts the flow and momentum of the narrator’s thoughts. Thus, also, the connection between the speaker and the utterance in the balloon is momentarily broken.

The Temporal and Rhythmic Functions of Speech Balloons

Having investigated some basic formal elements of speech representation and scenes of talk in comics, we should be able to focus more specifically on how some of these elements realise narrative functions in comics.

Character-­to­-character dialogue, or combined action and dialogue scenes, are central forms of narrative organisation and development in comics, as in literary fiction and film. 25 Dialogue scenes move the story forward, for instance, by giving important information about the characters, their relationships, the milieu, and the evolving events; they can also build suspense and reorientate the narrative. In comics, dialogue also regularly accompanies action. In Asterix , much of the talking between Asterix and Obelix, which is a constant feature of the series, takes place when the two characters are on the move or doing something. Action and dialogue are constantly bound together: while moving or acting out a scene, the characters discuss their intentions, thoughts, and emotions or voice comments about an event or someone they have met.

What Sarah Kozloff has outlined as the main narrative functions of dialogue in film largely apply to comics. Dialogue in films, as Kozloff points out, can contribute to many if not all key elements of a narrative: world construction and identification, characterisation, communication of narrative causality (such as the relation between events or the significance of an event), enactment of a narrative event (the disclosure of important information such as the speaker’s emotional state), adherence to realism (plausibility), and control of the viewer’s evaluation and emotions (the sense of narrative rhythm, the effects of surprise and suspense) (2000, 33–51). Inevitably, a given instance of dialogue can fulfil several of these functions simultaneously.

What is different in comics in this respect may to some extent be self­-evident. Comics lack the sound element, the means and possibilities of the moving image, and the actor’s work and personality is not an issue. With regard to narrative pacing and rhythm in comics, speech balloons play a vital role. Their arrangement in the panel, a sequence, or on the page, modifies both the sense of the time of the narrative and the order and time of reading. On the one hand, the utterances punctuate the story and the dialogue scene and, thus, create a sense of the duration of the event. Sometimes, the speech balloons can in themselves express duration through elongated forms of tails that surpass the frame borders. On the other hand, the speech balloons are part and parcel of the spatial organisation of the comic’s page. While the speech balloon constitutes a space where the utterance can be read, the placement and interrelation of the speech balloons in the space of the page also point out to the reader an order of looking and reading, functioning as one means of connectivity between the panels. From the reader’s perspective, thus, the utterances in a given narrative comic mark stages in the story that need to be attended to. 26 Speech balloons placed on the picture frames, for instance, or close to each other in neighbouring panels, can strengthen the link between the pictures and thus affirm the order of reading. Sometimes also, the space of the utterance can approximate the function of a picture frame or the space between the panels. The placement of speech balloons in a scene of talk may also emphasise, together with other features of the scene, particular aspects of the utterance and the speech situation.

The opening scene of Book One in Garth Ennis and Steve Dillon’s Preacher (1996) features a conversational scene between three characters, Jesse Custer, Tulip O’Hare, and Cassidy, who are conversing at a table in a diner in Texas. In this example, I would like to empha­sise the significance of three factors in the depiction of the scene: the place of the utterance, the effect of the moving perspective, and the means of layout. The first time we see the protagonist Reverend Jesse Custer’s face and his clerical collar, his utterance—‘’cause lemme tell you: it sure as hell ain’t the church’—is placed over the frame border. Both the placement of the utterance, the particularity of which is em­phasised by the fact that speech balloons very rarely cross the panel frames in this series, and the contrast between what Custer says and who he is stress the importance of the utterance (Figure 9.3). Further noteworthy elements in this panel are the angle of vision, which is placed squarely amidst the interlocutors and very close to Cassidy’s position in the scene, and the fact that two sides of the panel bleed off the corner of the page. The latter feature may compel the reader to turn the page to learn more about the contrast between the speaker and what he has said. In the following pages that depict the conversation, the perspective remains close to the characters, stressing the meaning of gazes and the exchange of looks. Moreover, and typically of dialogue scenes in many contemporary graphic novels, the perspective keeps steadily shifting around the conversing characters, moving to one more or less subjective angle of vision in each panel. Finally, page layout also contributes to this scene through the partial superimposition of some of the panels, such as a close­up image of Tulip O’Hare, on the surrounding panels, thus further aligning the interlocutors to each other and emphasising the importance of a particular gaze, expression, and utterance.

Concerning the sense of rhythm in such scenes, one default expectation is the correspondence between the utterance or an exchange of dialogue and the speaker’s (or listener’s) posture shown in the image. We could call this the realistic formula of time in a scene of talk. In other words, perhaps the most basic rhythm of speech representation in comics is one utterance per speaker, or one utterance and response per panel. Will Eisner, for instance, has stressed the importance of preserving such a bond between dialogue and action on the grounds of realism, claiming that a protracted exchange of dialogue cannot be realistically supported by unmoving static images. Furthermore, for Eisner, a veri­similar exchange of dialogue is one in which the utterances terminate the endurance of the image, that is, the dialogue corresponds with the speaker’s (or speakers’) posture in the image (1996, 60).

Figure 9.3  Garth Ennis and Steve Dillon. PREACHER . Book One (1995) © Garth Ennis and Steve Dillon. All characters, the distinctive likenesses thereof, and all related elements are trademarks of Garth Ennis and Steve Dillon.

However, Eisner’s presumption, while it illustrates a basic convention for representing duration in conversational scenes in much comics storytelling, can be contested as an all-­encompassing general rule of realistic speech. Clearly, instead of undermining the sense of veracity in a conversational exchange, a long string or multitude of balloons in one panel can also enhance realism in narration. On the first page of Preacher , Cassidy’s and Tulip O’Hare’s utterances have two parts—their difference is marked, respectively, by the conventions of one balloon opening onto another and by a connecting tail between the balloons. This is a common way to indicate a short pause in speech. Elsewhere, the placement of many speech balloons in one panel can create the effect of a speeded-­up and intensified exchange of words. Strings of balloons or a mass of balloons in one panel may, for instance, suggest the effect of an improvised discourse, conversational intensity (as in the streets of Lutetia in Les lauriers de César ), interruption and talking over others, the volume of speech, a cacophony of voices, and so on. Many superimposed balloons can also indicate a disconnection between speech and thought, as happens in Mister Wonderful , where the narrative captions that are placed on the speech balloons and sometimes even on the speakers’ faces emphasise the effect of an inner voice overriding speech. Moreover, a protracted exchange of dialogue in one panel may suggest a notable speeding or slowing of time in a scene of talk, instead of undermining conversational veracity.

Furthermore, it is important to note that the relation between speech and posture does not alone create the sense of rhythm in dialogue scenes. The panel­-to­-panel transitions and other spatial relations on the page, including the sense of time in a single panel, also affect our understanding of the time and duration of a scene of talk. In our previous example of Meti , the sequence suggests a slowing of time during the dialogue scene: the cartoonist’s hurry to start the interview—he is visibly out of breath when he enters the room in the first panel—is contrasted with Meti’s relaxed attitude. Meti’s calmness has become evident to the reader already in the previous wordless pages of the story, which portray her leisurely picking berries, preparing a pie, and baking it in the kitchen. The fourth and the only wordless panel in this sequence, in which the perspective is more distant and impersonal, powerfully suggests the passing and slowing of time. In these five panels, the cartoonist figure thus apparently adjusts to Meti’s sense of time by eating lingonberry pie and drinking coffee. Only then can the actual storytelling start.

Conversational scenes, when perceived as distinct scenes, may alter the temporal rhythm in relation to the surrounding narrative action. This dimension of dialogue scenes in comics corresponds with what Kozloff refers to as the control of viewer evaluation and emotional response through dialogue. In comics, as in film, such scenes can distract, create suspense and surprise, or control emotional response by elongating a moment and stretching out a suspenseful climax or pause. The conversation at the beginning of Preacher , which turns out to be a frame narrative for much of the ensuing story in Book One of the series, introduces us to the main characters and opens up several questions about their situation that will be dealt with in the subsequent instalments of the story. Scenes of talk can also slow down the tempo in the narrative, as in the example from Meti above, to the extent that they give us an impression of simultaneity between the time of the events and the time of their telling and showing. In comics that include extensive dia­logue during the action, such as Asterix or other European adventure series, such as Spirou and Fantasio , such temporal changes may not be apparent, however, since the action and dialogue establish such a steady rhythm throughout the narrative.

Figure 9.4  Jérôme Mulot & Florent Ruppert. Barrel of Monkeys © 2008, Ruppert, Mulot & L’Association, Rebus Books for the english translation.

Jérôme Mulot and Florent Ruppert’s comic books, including Safari monseigneur (2005), Panier de singe ( Barrel of Monkeys , 2006), and Le Tricheur (2008), make visible a number of underlying principles in speech representation in comics. For instance, they extend the traditional realistic duration of speech in a panel: Ruppert and Mulot sometimes place up to twenty balloons per panel for one speaker and thus obfuscate the expectation of synchrony between the speaker’s posture in the image and the utterance (Figure 9.4). Furthermore, their work investigates the rules of readable information, that is, that speech balloons should contain informative utterances that are attributed to some agent in the story. Generally speaking, certain constraints guarantee the readability of speech balloons in comics. This means that one is to avoid (a) superimposed speech balloons that block the reading of other balloons, unless the superimposed balloons serve a clear narrative function such as indicating the simultaneity of many voices; (b) balloons placed in a semantically important part of the image (such as the speaker’s face); (c) balloons that are ‘cut’ by the image frame so that they become unreadable (this may also happen in Mister Wonderful to point out the narrator’s lack of attention or interest); and (d) continuous nonsensical expressions or empty balloons. However, single ‘blah­blahs’ or empty balloons can be very revelatory of attitude or a lack of response.

Still other experiments with speech and thought balloons in Ruppert and Mulot’s comic books involve the breaking of the flat symbolic space of the speech and thought balloon. For instance, letters and signs regularly overlap the balloon contours and extend to the space of the image in their works, thus undermining the expectation that the balloon is an enclosed space in itself, or speech and thought balloons are treated as literal containers that convey the illusion of three­-dimensionality. Some of Ruppert and Mulot’s speech and thought balloons, or their contents, can be seen, touched, and entered, whereas others may indicate the speaker’s movement in space as a kind of visual trace of the movement.

The Narrative Function of Visual and Verbal Contrast in Dialogue Scenes

Still another medium-­specific aspect in conversational scenes in comics is the narrative effect (rather than function) of contrast, or narratively motivated transition, in the balance between visual and verbal narration. For instance, a scene of character-­to-­character dialogue in comics can always turn into a predominantly visual narrative that fleshes out the topic of the conversation in narrative drawings, or vice versa. This is a typical element in Aapo Rapi’s Meti and complicates in this story the question of the identity of the narrative agent responsible for what is shown in the images. Lilli Carré’s The Lagoon (2008), in turn, depicts a scene where someone is telling a tale, and the oral story is then transformed into a visual narrative that the reader can see evolving from panel to panel. The shift from verbal to graphic narration thus dra­matises the temporal distance between the present of the storytelling and the past of the story events, but it also has the narrative effect of accentuating the storyteller’s skill of inviting the listener into her world and experiencing it from within. Such transferences between verbal and visual narration may in some cases be compared to shifts between different diegetic levels in a literary narrative, for instance when an interlocutor in a conversation becomes a narrator of his or her own story. Yet, the multimodal nature of comics allows the invention of forms of complexity in this regard, pertaining to the relation between the time of the events and the time of their telling, or the source and perspective of narration, that are not available in the monomodal context of literary narratives.

Cartoonists can set up tensions between verbal and visual narration in conversational scenes for various other effects as well. Another device for contrasting verbal and visual narration is to juxtapose the time and place of an ongoing conversation and the time and place of the events that are the topic of the conversation. For instance, at the beginning of Jean­Claude Mézières and Pierre Christin’s Brooklyn Station Terminus Cosmos (1981), where the main characters Valerian and Laureline are engaged in a long telepathic intergalactic conversation, their dia­logue provides the story with a narrative frame. This global frame embeds images from the speakers’ memories as short flashbacks as well as illustrations of things and events that the speakers have heard. The extended present moment of the dialogue thus creates a kind of intersub­jective consciousness frame that incorporates different temporalities and changes of space, which are shown in the narrative drawings. The dia­logue may specify that the things seen in the panels have a varying relation to reality—first­ or second­hand information, mnemonic images, or things seen in the speakers’ present whereabouts—or different meanings for each speaker. The overall effect, however, is not one of simple framing and embedding, but the time and space in which speakers are situated occasionally also appear to coalesce with those of their stories and memories as the speakers share the imagery through the telepathic link.

The ultimate goal of this chapter has been an attempt to develop a more general understanding of the basic elements, main compositional principles, and narrative functions of speech and dialogue in comics. One crucial area for future research that is indicated by this discussion is the way in which the image content, especially the embodiment of the participants, contributes to the conversational scene and the interpretative effects that the scene generates. Typically, the images in comics show involvement in scenes of talk through shared or contrasted perspectives, an exchange of looks, or through gesture, posture, and other physical signs of reaction to others. A key aspect of dialogue in comics in this respect is the depiction of the participants’ face and facial expressions. Visual symbols and verbal­-visual signs, such as emanata, which are added to or around the participants’ face and head in some comics, can specify an expression, show mental states, and emphasise a reaction to someone or something that is said. Furthermore, comics may manipulate the characters’ body shape and size to underline certain aspects of a speaker’s experience, attitude, or personality, or their reaction and engagement in the speech situation. Together and in interaction with the verbal content of the dialogue, these elements produce an integrated, but often quite complex, whole.

Finally, all compositional and spatial elements in comics can have an expressive function that contributes to the reader’s understanding of conversational scenes in this medium. Changing picture frames, panel forms, panel and balloon shapes and sizes, page setup, lettering and letter size, non­realistic backgrounds, 27 and other components of graphic style can convey relevant information, for instance, by emphasising or modifying the meaning of the utterances or pointing out the salient features in the situation. Moreover, the relations between the panels may imply relevant narrative information about the scene; the gaps in what is visually shown in the panel images need to be related to what is said but also to the gaps in the dialogue. The precise meaning of the potentially meaningful formal elements in a scene of talk depends again on the co­occurrence and combination of these elements and on their tension and interaction with what is said and shown in the images.

Comics share various functions of narrative communication through di­alogue with other narrative media, but also employ many medium­-specific strategies that render impossible any direct comparison with dialogue scenes in literature or film. Speech in comics is not only given in a written form but also (usually) in a drawn form, a kind of graphic writing. In this respect, comics vary greatly in the extent that they can maximize the graphic and typographical effects of written speech. The speech balloons function as a visual metaphor for a speech act, voice, and source. At the same time, the speech balloon, the tail, and para­balloonic utterances contribute to the organisation of the time of the narrative and the order and time of reading. Above I have also investigated the common convention in comics that an utterance is physically tied to its source, the speaker, and that this relation suggests a certain (imaginary) duration of time. By developing Thierry Groensteen’s (1999, 2007) insights about the elemental association between the speaker and the utterance, I have sought to contextualise this compositional principle in relation to other key elements of conversational scenes in comics.

1 See also Saraceni (2003, 66–67) on how this may happen in thought balloons and monologue.

2 Oswalt defines an ‘imitative’ as “a word based on an approximation of some non­linguistic sound but adapted to the phonemic system of the language” (1994, 293).

3 See also Frank Bramlett, who stresses that a linguistic investigation of language in comics needs to consider the balance of realism in the characters’ language and the amount of linguistic exaggeration and simplification that is typical of the medium (2012, 183). See also Hatfield (2005, 34), Groensteen (2007, 129), and Miodrag (2013, 32–36).

4 The art historian Ernst Gombrich famously named this rule Töpffer’s law: “For any drawing of a human face, however inept, however childish, possesses, by the very fact that it has been drawn, a character and an expression” (Gombrich 1960, 339–340).

5 Bremond points out how the ‘teratological’ anatomies of certain characters in comics allow us to pose the question of which bodily organs are absolutely indispensable for the realisation of gestural messages (1968, 99).

6 One type of gazing that may be equally well­-portrayed in dialogue scenes is the characters’ joint visual attention to something. For a reference in film studies, see, for instance, Persson (2003, 68–91).

7 See Baetens (2004) on the depiction of hands in Yves Chaland’s and Jacques Tardi’s works. 8 See, for instance, Persson on visual media and personal space (2003, 109–110). 9 Speakers in real­life speech situations can co­opt almost any physical action conversationally, that is, demonstrate by timing an action with the verbal communication that the non­verbal act has a communicative function (Bavelas and Chovil 2006, 100).

10 E.S. Tan argues that some graphic novels avoid using the schema of facial expressions altogether, “either because it is too explicit, or because the emotions that characters have are too complex to be ‘told’ through the face” (2001, 45). I would argue that narration “through the face” is a matter of stylistic choice rather than a reflection of the story’s simplicity.

11 Kennedy distinguishes actual pictorial runes that are metaphorical, such as the state of anxiety shown by eye spirals, from graphic lines that have some literal intent as they attempt to convey perceptual impressions, such as lines radiating from bright light (1982, 600). Forceville has adopted Kennedy’s term (2005, 2011). In his tongue­in­cheek lexicon, Mort Walker defines em­anata as emanating outwards “from things as well as people to show what’s going on”, such as a character’s “internal conditions” (2000).

12 See also Dürrenmatt’s (2013, 115–127) discussion of how exclamation points, question marks, and ellipses have become autonomous means of description in the medium, especially for expressing characters’ emotions, mental states, and/or silence.

13 Forceville, El Rafaie, and Meesters distinguish a pictogram from a pictorial rune on the basis that an isolated pictogram, such as $ or ♥, has “some basic meaning of its own when encountered outside of comics”, unlike a pictorial rune such as motion lines, droplets, spikes, or spirals (2014, 492–493). They admit, however, that the borderline between the two categories may be fuzzy (2014, 494).

14 Suzanne Covey distinguishes between ‘descriptive’ sound effects, by which she means “words, usually verbs, that don’t attempt to reproduce the sounds they depict” and onomatopoeic words that try to approximate sounds at least to some degree (2006).

15 Forceville, Veale, and Feyaerts include in para­ and quasi­balloonic phenomena the various non­bordered zones of the picture that display onomatopoeia and sound effects (2010, 65). On onomatopoeia in French­language comics, see Fresnault­Deruelle (1977, 185–199).

16 Some examples are discussed, for instance, in Dürrenmatt (2013, 165–167). 17 Compare with Chapman (1984, 18–24) on the difficulties of reproducing speech in written dialogue.

18 Forceville emphasises, importantly, the combined effect of non­verbal signs in comics in the representation of emotions such as anger (2005, 84–85). 19 See Smolderen (2002, 2009, 119–127) on why the speech balloon was rarely utilised as a citation of a character’s speech before Richard F. Outcault’s “The Yellow Kid”. There are important exceptions, however (see the last chapter of this book). Lefèvre discusses the gradual spread of the balloon device in European comics since its final breakthrough in the 1930s (2006).

20 Saraceni argues succinctly that the “function of the tail is equivalent to that of clauses like ‘he said’ or ‘Ann thought’ in reported speech or thought” (2003, 9).

21 Lawrence Abbott’s educated guess about eye movements and the order of reading comics is similar to Groensteen’s suggestions, but Abbott puts the main stress on words and verbal narration (1986, 159–162).

22 Will Eisner’s caution in this matter seems justified, even if eye­-tracking research has made important advances recently: “In comics, no one really knows for certain whether the words are read before or after viewing the picture. We have no real evidence that they are read simultaneously. There is a different cognitive process between reading words and pictures. But in any event, the image and the dialogue give meaning to each other—a vital element in graphic storytelling” (1996, 59).

23 See also Forceville (2013), who discusses some effects of tailless balloons and tails that do not point toward an identified or identifiable speaker.

24 Carrier (2000, 42–43) associates this effect with a page from Joe Sacco’s Palestine , but does not explicate how the effect is created. See also Force­ville (2013, 265–266) on a panel in Régis Franc’s Nouvelles Histoires: Un dimanche d’été , where a substantial number of tails do not point toward any identifiable speaker, thus creating the effect of a palaver where “it does not matter very much who is saying what”.

25 See also Phelan and Rabinowitz (2012, 37–38). 26 In Groensteen’s formulation, the positioning of the balloons in the space of the page creates a rhythm in reading as “each text fragment retains some moment of our attention, introducing a brief pause in the movement that sweeps across the page” (2007, 83).

27 On how pictorial metaphors in the image background may express a person’s emotional state in manga, see Shinohara and Matsunaka (2009, 283–290).

The Hooded Utilitarian

A pundit in every panopticon, how do comics artists use speech balloons.

This post is the first in a series on how comics artists represent talk in comics. I’ll be writing about speech balloons and how the discipline of conversation analysis (CA) helps us understand how creative these artists can be when they try to show the intricacies of everyday talk.

Consider the following two panels. These are from the webcomic Scenes from a Multiverse by Jon Rosenberg.  (Click on each of the titles to see the full comic.)

Both of these are the final panel in the comic. Specifically, each one is panel 5 of a 5 panel comic. Understanding the speech and the speech balloons in these two panels will depend on the sequencing of balloons in previous panels and, to some extent, the social context of the conversation.

In most kinds of comics, speech balloons show conversations in relatively uncontroversial ways. In smaller panels, there may be one, two, or three characters producing speech, while larger panels and full-page panels may contain a dozen or more characters talking at the same time. In conversation analysis (CA), the approach to studying talk is to keep track of the number of turns, how long the turns are, how many speakers there are, and how much silence there is, among others. This post is the first in a series about speech balloons and conversation sequence. In particular, I will focus on how comics artists draw two or more characters talking at the same time.

When two or more speakers produce speech at exactly the same time, then this is called simultaneous talk. (Sometimes it is called interruption, and sometimes it is overlap, but this depends on interpretation.) When listening to conversations, it is relatively easy to identify moments when participants are talking ‘on top of each other.’ And in transcribing the speech, there is a small set of typographical symbols that scholars typically use to do this. Consider the following excerpt, taken from an article by Emanuel Schegloff (2000) on simultaneous talk (p. 26). The two speakers, Anne and Dick, are an elderly couple who have been married for a long time. In this short excerpt, we see a good bit of simultaneous talk. Anne and Dick are having a conversation with their daughter, and it takes a funny turn in that Dick gives Anne a hard time about spending money on shoes and her claim about how many pairs of shoes she owned.

SOURCE: Schegloff, E. (2000). Overlapping talk and the organization of turn-taking for conversation. Language in Society , 29 (1): 1–63.

Lines 52 and 53 are clear examples. According to this transcription, at exactly the same time that Dick begins the word ‘six,’ Anne begins her utterance with ‘WHY’. The effect is that while Dick already has the conversational floor, Anne joins in, and the listeners have to keep track of what both of them are saying. At the end of Dick’s word ‘shoes’, he stops speaking but Anne continues her turn through line 54. The use of all capital letters indicates that Anne is using a LOUD volume.

It’s one thing to listen to speech and write it down in a transcription. But in comics, it seems to me that it’s a creative challenge to represent simultaneous speech using speech balloons. In other words, how does an artist use visual cues (putting one balloon on top of another) to signal a certain kind of verbal cue (two or more speakers talking at the same time)?

The question I have is whether the visual difference in the balloons has a material impact on the way readers ‘hear’ the speech. Does the doctor’s turn ‘sound the same’ as the dad’s turn? If there is a difference, is it a difference of kind or a difference of degree? To answer the questions, we should examine each of the comics in terms of conversation and speech balloons.

The Symbiote

The first two panels of ‘The Symbiote’ show very traditional strategies for representing turns and turn-taking. The doctor in panel 1 begins the sequence, with the patient taking the second turn, and the two trading off in panel 2 as well. Even though the tails cross in panel 1, I think readers would perceive these turns as more or less separate, perhaps with no simultaneous speech at all. In panel 2, the visual separation of the balloons is even clearer, indicating that the two speakers are being careful to take turns without ‘stepping on each other’s toes.’

The Superbowl (sic)

In panels 1 and 2 of ‘The Superbowl,’ the speech turns proceed much like those in ‘The Symbiote.’ I think the visual separation of speech turns here is crisp, with the tails of the balloons never crossing. The content of the balloons indicates that the daughter takes the first turn by asking a question and the dad takes the second turn by answering the question. This is true for both panels.

If we consider the sequence of panels 3-4-5 in both comics, we may be able to discern more readily whether the speech in the final panels are indeed different kinds of simultaneous speech.

In both comics, panel three is composed very similarly. The speech balloons of speakers 1 and 2 are touching, and in fact the balloon of speaker 2 is ever so slightly overlaid onto the balloon of speaker 1. Panel 4 in ‘The Symbiote’ has just one speaker, the doctor, but Panel 4 in ‘The Superbowl’ shows the two speakers producing some measure of simultaneous talk.

As we saw at the beginning of this post, panel 5 for both comics shows that one balloon is overlaid on top of the other. It is more than likely that readers are supposed to ‘hear’ simultaneous talk. In other words, the doctor talks at the same time as the patient, and the dad talks at the same time as the daughter.

What interests me about them is that in both panels, one speech balloon overlaps the other. There are some slight differences, however. In ‘The Symbiote,’ the doctor’s speech balloon overlaps the patient’s speech balloon, but all the words are visible. On the other hand, in ‘The Superbowl,’ the dad’s balloon overlaps the daughter’s but also partially obscures two words ( on and grass ). What is not clear is whether the balloon obscures additional words or other symbols in the balloon, symbols like ellipses (…).  But is the amount of simultaneous talk the same? If we hear the panels differently, what elements of each comic are we meant to consider when we decide how they sound?

When you read these two comics, how do you ‘hear’ the turns playing out? What might Rosenberg be trying to accomplish by drawing one speech balloon on top of another?  How much does the turn-taking sequence affect our perception of the balloons? And how much of an impact does the social context or the identity of the speakers have?

In part 2 of this series, I’ll talk about simultaneous discourse in Grant Morrison’s The Invisibles .

12 thoughts on “ How do comics artists use speech balloons? ”

Nice job! I’d like to see you take on the elaborate, intertwined speech balloons in most Brian Michael Bendis comics: I’m not sure it’s simultaneous speech often, but it’s still a way to visualize rapid interchange.

I love overlapping speech bubbles, because they suggest a reading rhythm.

When I read comics, the extent of the overlap to me suggests to what extent one person is talking over another. In the first case above, I’d read that as the doctor ‘jumping in,’ but not talking over. Maybe the last word was spoken over, if at all.

In the second case, the father talks over a substantial part of the daughter’s speech.

I’d be interested in how this plays out in terms of the writer, artist and letterer collaborating to present the conversation.

Oh, and a couple of years ago a wrote a piece for Sounding Out! about sound in comics and argued (in part) that our familiarity with the rhythms of conversation help provide the inter-panel closure that make comics work.

“This is Not a Sound”: The Treachery of Sound in Comic Books

Hi, Corey! Thanks! I’m not familiar with Bendis, but I will put those comics on my reading list.

Kailyn, I think you’re right. It seems that the dad more actively ‘cuts off’ what the daughter is saying.

Thanks for the link, Osvaldo. I will check it out!

If you haven’t already, I recommend that you take a look at Howard Chaykin’s American Flagg!

I find the final panel of the Super Bowl sequence particularly fascinating (and by the way Frank – I suspect that you are one of a minority of academics who would have caught the mistake in “Superbowl”!)

I like to think about the content of comics panels on roughly Waltonian terms, as some of you know (see Kendall Walton: Mimesis as Make Believe: On the Foundations of the Representational Arts, Harvard 1993). So the question I like to ask is: What are we meant to imagine when ‘decoding’ the panel and its contents?

Now, consider the partially obscured word “grass” in the last panel, and the undepicted but somewhat strongly implied final word “for” in the same panel. There are at least six questions we can ask:

(i) Are we meant to imagine that the daughter utters “grass”? (ii) Are we meant to imagine that the father hears the utterance of “grass”? (iii) Are we meant to imagine that we hear the utterance of “grass”? (iv) Are we meant to imagine that the daughter utters “for”? (v) Are we meant to imagine that the father hears the utterance of “for”? (vi) Are we meant to imagine that we hear the utterance of “for”?

The best answers I have to these questions are (i) Yes – definitely (ii) Maybe? (iii) Yes – I think, (iv) Maybe – It might be another word (although that seems unlikely) (v) No – I think, and (vi) I have no freaking idea.

I would love to hear what others think about this.

Conversation analysis seems like a very fruitful way of looking at speech balloons and turn-taking in comics, Frank. This post is quite helpful. Though I, too, am given pause by the obscured aspects of the daughter’s speech in Panel 5 of The Superbowl, I am even more intrigued by the difference between the overlaps between father and daughter’s speech in panels 4 and 5. I tend to be most interested in issues of power when I look at transcribed conversations (who interrupts whom? who speaks longer, who asks more questions, who adds tag questions like “right?”, “isn’t it?,” etc., how do the speech patterns displayed echo or refute relative degrees of speaker status, how is silence used….). Therefore, I’m struck by the fact that the daughter’s balloon overlaps her father’s in panel 4 (as it logically should since her question came first in time), but the father’s balloon overlaps the daughter’s in panel 5 despite the fact that her question must have emerged prior to his admonishment. In the case of panel 5, the performative act of the father– hushing his daughter–trumps strict narrative time, and we get to see that his desire to watch the commercials blots out/cancels his previous patience with his daughter’s questions and thus, covers over/blots out her linguistic agency. I’d definitely say this proves your point that speech balloons can be used creatively to make the reader imagine speakers conversing in a natural way, but also to indicate the perlocutionary aspects of these speech acts.

Roy! I knew I needed to acknowledge the spelling of Superbowl, if for no other reason than the comic is a satiric comment on the way that Americans engage with that particular pastime.

As I was writing the post, I was imagining how you might bring Walton to bear on it. Your questions i-vi are great, and it’s fun to think about them. I’ll respond a little more to them below.

Adrielle: thanks for a great comment…I find CA to be an important and useful tool in understanding language in comics. In my own research, I also try to ask questions about social identity and power as they are found in conversation, and I’m glad you mention them. I chose these two comics because there is a kind of parallel here: we might call both of them examples of asymmetrical discourse because one speaker (the doctor, the father) has more social power than the other speaker (patient, daughter). The relationships aren’t the same, of course, but they offer a productive opportunity for comparison.

I think that Roy’s questions ii & v relate very specifically to Adrielle’s questions about power and agency. Perhaps the father hears the daughter’s turn in its entirety but simply chooses to ignore it. In this case, though, the content of the dad’s turn (Quiet sweetie…) suggests that even if he does hear the whole turn, he is actively squashing it. (This is also a weird example of language socialization, when caregivers use linguistic strategies to teach children how to behave.)

I think panel 4 in The Superbowl is a problematic moment of speech balloons and simultaneous talk gone awry, and I am thinking about coming back to that one in a future post.

Hi, Tony. I will add Chaykin’s American Flagg to my list, too. Thanks for the note.

Love this post, Frank! I also want to echo Adrielle’s comments (and your response) about how the overlapping speech balloons visualize the dynamics of power and agency in the conversation really well. What struck me at the end of “Symbiote” is more than just the fact that the two are talking over one another, but that they are no longer even engaged in a genuine conversation. Once the doctor shifts into the jargon of health insurance protocols, he is basically just talking to himself. As a result, the overlapping balloons convey a greater distance between the two speakers, and although the doctor is in the position of authority, his unwillingness to listen makes him look foolish. The same is true for the second strip, where the father’s ignorance about the sport prompts him to leave the conversation by shifting into condescending “parent-speak.” Is there are term/concept in linguistics for when speakers have mentally left a conversation and their speech goes on a kind of autopilot of trite phrases and meaningless responses?

Thanks, Qiana! (I had fun writing it!)

When describing that moment when a speaker goes on ‘autopilot,’ the term that comes to mind immediately is ‘conversation routine.’ When we say things because we’re supposed to say them, we’re frequently using a routine.

Robert Hopper wrote about routines, and one example that always struck me was the telephone conversation. We start out by saying ‘hello’ or some equivalent. But really that isn’t even the first turn. The first thing that happens is that the phone rings, so it’s a signal that we need to enter into a routine to begin the conversation successfully.

Routines are only a small part of our repertoire, though. We use those formulaic utterances to greet people, to say goodbye, to open or close committee meetings, etc. So I wouldn’t say that the dad is using a widely used routine. On the other hand, you termed it “condescending ‘parent-speak,'” and my best guess is that there are formulaic utterances that parents use with their children quite regularly.

I’m afraid that I don’t have a good answer for the other part of your question, when speakers have mentally left a conversation. I think that’s a much harder question!

Comments are closed.

When Did Word Balloons and Thought Balloons Debut in Comics?

In their latest spotlight on notable comic firsts, CSBG delves into the history of speech balloons and thought balloons in comics.

In "When We First Met," we spotlight the various characters, phrases, objects or events that eventually became notable parts of comic lore, like the first time someone said, "Avengers Assemble!" or the first appearance of Batman's giant penny or the first appearance of Alfred Pennyworth or the first time Spider-Man's face was shown half-Spidey/half-Peter. Stuff like that.

Reader Steven H. wanted to know about specifically the history of the thought balloon, when that balloon was designed as a sort of cloud rather than a word balloon, but you know what? While I'm answering that, I should really just detail the history of the speech balloon in comics period.

What we now think of as word balloons probably owe their origins to 15th Century paintings and drawings that had I guess what you would call a "speech band," these sort of tapestries with words on them.

These are courtesy of some amazing research by the great historian about classic cartoons and comic strips, Andy Konky Kru .

From 1404, Konrad von Soest's Altar in Bad Wildungen...

From 1498, Cornelis' "Knight and Death"...

Okay, so that would be the standard for years, but as editorial cartoons became more and more popular in the 18th Century, we began to see the birth of what you would call a speech balloon in a number of British editorial cartoons...

From 1749...

Through the 1770s...

The idea of the word balloon was gaining popularity. However, not everyone liked the idea. In fact, the famous cartoonist, William Hogarth, mocked the idea in one of his cartoons in 1756...

So word balloons pretty much fell by the wayside by the time that the 19th Century began.

This brings us to essentially the introduction of the modern comic strip, which is where these things really came into focus. "Comes into focus," though, is a bit of a key term here in the sense that these things were not exactly clear cut. It wasn't like one guy decided, "Oh, hey, I'm going to have word balloons" and everyone copied him. No, it was a lot more subtle than that and there were all these other minor comic strips running around in American newspapers in the late 19th Century that it is difficult to truly determine which strip should be credited with being the "first" of anything, which is why we have more commonly come to credit the strips that rather POPULARIZED specific innovations rather than necessarily CREATED them. In other words, when the other comic strip artists out there were taking their cues, they were taking them from these innovators, so even if they weren't necessarily the FIRST to do their particular changes to the comic strip form, they were close enough that we might as well give them the credit. It's sort of a twist on the ol' koan, "If a tree falls in a forest and no one is around to hear it, does it make a sound?" in the sense that "If a comic strip debuts an idea but no one reads it, does it really count?"

In any event, this is a roundabout way to take us to Richard F. Outcault and his comic strip, Hogan's Alley, which told the stories of poor kids in New York City slums. Outcault did not use word balloons.

However, at one point, he had a distinctive poor kid show up in one of his strips...

That kid and his yellow outfit soon became the star of the strip, which was immensely popular at the time.

The "Yellow Kid" had dialogue, but it all went on his shirt...

However, while Outcault tended away from speech balloons, as you can see from this typical strip of his...

He DID have word balloons at times...

And since the strip was so popular, the word balloons likely influenced others. Including one strip that launched around the same time that was probably the birth of many of the modern aspects of comic strips...

Page 2: [valnet-url-page page=2 paginated=0 text='Enter the Katzenjammer Kids!']

Rudolph Dirks introduced a comic strip in 1897 called The Katzenjammer Kids, based on the classic German children's story, Max and Moritz, about two rambunctious little kids. In the original story, though, Max and Moritz were horrifically punished for their pranks. This twist here, then, is that the kids get away with their pranks...

As you can see from their first strip, Dirks was keeping with the standard approach of the era of no word balloons. However, Dirks soon evolved the strip to the point where not only were word balloons standard, but so, too, were more innovative stuff like dreams balloons...

Plus, Dirks is the guy who came up with thought balloons and making them look like clouds...

It's hard to find examples, but that's the best that I've got.

By the early 20th Century, Outcault had moved on to Buster Brown, which routinely used word balloons...

And pretty much everyone was using them by now, like Little Nemo in Slumberland...

The word balloons and the thought balloons were now solidly applied parts of comic strip culture and they have lived on ever since, especially in comic books. Like in Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster's first Superman story in Action Comics #1...

Thanks for the question, Steven!

If anyone else has a question/suggestion for a notable comic book first, drop me a line at [email protected]!

Thursday, January 07, 2016

The art of speech balloons.

26 comments:

So we seem to have two Venn discs. One is "artistically integrated" text -- part of the composition and style, as in the Cuneo instance. (I could get only one Steinberg to enlarge and its text was random scribbling, not actual words.) The basic problem here is legibility. The other disc is "functionally maximized communication." That would be represented by the McCay, Raymond and Wood examples. Since communication is essential if spoken words are to be conveyed, the Venn discs must overlap to some degree in Venn-diagram form. I suppose the underlying issue in David's post has to do with the optimal degree of overlap. That will vary by circumstance. If I had to put money on it, I'd say that the Alex Raymond (and Hal Foster) solution is the best compromise -- the art being uncontaminated by the verbiage. On the other hand, this separation can lack "punch" of balloon captions where more than one subject is speaking, a dialog taking place in the same frame.

For me the real issue is the temporal nature of reading the speech balloon and how this relates to the static instant of time realised by the accompanying picture. It's like overhearing a conversation going on behind closed doors and at some critically chosen moment the door is very quickly opened and shut, allowing us a glimpse of the people talking and what they are up to. And as far as I can tell, the quality of the artwork itself has little or no effect on how much we believe in the connection between it and the words inside the speech bubbles. The conventions of the form has me believing the words are spoken as much by the characters in weak or inept artwork as in masterful artwork. I might even go so far to say I am more persuaded that the words come from the character's mouths in weak artwork; perhaps because the gap between crude pictograms and the text itself is that much loser.

I like the Italian word for them—fumetti— "little puffs of smoke." Hope you can do a future post about briffits, blurgits, plewds, and emanata. Never ran across that word "banderoles" before for those little heraldic banners. And glad you showed W. McCay. Interesting to see the first few Sundays of Nemo, how he tried running text below the picture, and word balloons, and both, and finally settled on the balloons.

Dave Sim's graphic novel monsterpiece, Cerebus, seems a natural example of brilliance in this context.

@James Gurney The italian word "fumetti" is for comics. The ballons are called "nuvolette" (little clouds) Best Gino

This is a topic that fascinates me, and some of those ancient cartoons were new to me. I've always loved the different "sounds"(synaesthetically speaking) that different artists' handwriting make. For example, McKay's handwriting always sounds uniquely young to me, and innocent. And, for my money, it plays off the linear precisionism of his architectural rendering in a rather wonderful and expressive way. My only disagreement with your post would be on that Gonzales page, which, frankly, portrays artistic exhaustion and little else. If we want to talk about comics, Alex Toth was an authentic master of the theory and art of portraying sound and speech in comics. If he had any say in the matter, he would sequence and orchestrate the visual events that were his balloons and sound effects in the exact same sense in which he sequenced and orchestrated the visual events of his panels. The end result was that the whole experience of his pages, every face, every hand, every sound, every utterance, became subject to his narrative intentions and control; all was equal in terms of the story flow and anything worth putting down on a page was worth composing to achieve visual effectiveness. Very few comic artists had or have such an elastic conception of what constitutes a narrative event. Mostly there is a kind of rote teaching that all balloons go at the top of the panels and the overall read of the text should be a dogmatic zigzag. This system puts the dialogue in parallel with the visual events being illustrated, keeping the symbolic realms alienated from one another. Whereas Toth integrated both into a single event stream.

You might want to take a look at David Mazzucchelli’s Asterios Polyp, for this one.

Donald Pittenger-- I think if we look at the compromise as "art being uncontaminated by the verbiage" (or verbiage being uncontaminated by the art") we loose some of the potential of this medium. I grant you, that dichotomy is the way most people view the issue. But I think artists such as Steinberg do something special with the combination that creates more than the sum of its parts. He isn't robbing Peter to pay Paul (or robbing verbiage to pay art). For example, is there any question of legibility in that Steinberg drawing, where the "random scribbling" is contradicted by the outline of the word balloon which says "no." Chris Bennett wrote "I am more persuaded that the words come from the character's mouths in weak artwork..." Chris, that's an interesting point I hadn't considered. I've often commented here on how many of today's popular graphic novelists deal with more sophisticated subject matter but employ very weak drawing skills. Perhaps there's a rationale behind it. James Gurney-- "briffits, blurgits, plewds, and emanata" Wow. I'm always learning something here. And I agree with you about McCay. He was so extraordinary, he deserves more attention than he gets today.

Chris: "For me the real issue is the temporal nature of reading the speech balloon and how this relates to the static instant of time realised by the accompanying picture" i don't see it like that. when you follow the frames in a comic book sequence the imagination is constantly 'filling in' the missing visual information / movement between static images. imagining how the character might move from one position to the next etc. this is how comics / graphic novels work. so the drawings are never completely static in the mind. at least, they shouldn't be if the comic is any good. "The conventions of the form has me believing the words are spoken as much by the characters in weak or inept artwork as in masterful artwork." what makes the dialogue appear believable to any particular drawing is (for me) simply the quality of the 'acting'. how an artist makes a character appear to be alive, rather than just a well rendered figure study, and how they imbue the character with that 'decisive moment' quality when they appear to be paused mid-speech at just the right expressive moment, is a real skill. generally speaking, over-rendered artwork will kill the spontaneous-moment quality off. 'fluid', less-is-more styles tend to work much better since they more readily produce that 'before and after' the moment effect in the imagination.

Bread-- I enjoy Mazzucchelli's work but haven't spent enough time with it. Are you referring to the fact that his female characters speak in rounded balloons while his male characters speak in angular balloons, or are there additional features I've missed? Anonymous-- yes, there are a number of talented cartoonists (Alex Toth is another example) who have attempted to do something more with speech balloons. Gino Selva-- Thanks, always happy to hear from the polyglots here. Kev Ferrara-- perhaps one reason McCay's lettering reads "young" to you (it does to me too) is that he seemed to repeatedly make the mistake of drawing the balloon first and then lettering the text, so he frequently ran out of room. You see him squeezing the letters together and shrinking them down as he realizes he's about to run out of space, just the way a second grader does when learning penmanship. I agree with you about Toth-- I even considered adding an example of his speech balloons but I am working out of Chicago this week and didn't have access to the example I wanted. I disagree with you (not surprisingly) about the Gonzales image. The picture is not just an ordinary panel, it is a full page, and I view it as an act of boldness and strength rather than "artistic exhaustion." It's here primarily because I love the distinction between the sharp edged, high contrast word balloons and the soft, fields of value in the sky. As a reference point, Rembrandt's sky in his Three Trees etching (http://illustrationart.blogspot.com/2006/07/how-many-lines-does-it-take-to-draw.html) fills most of the image with abstract designs where changes in value are achieved using line rather than tone.

David, Regarding McKay: I think the quality mostly derives from the tentativeness of the strokes, that they are handwritten/each letter unique and characterized by the hand, and the lightness of the negative space because of the stroke thinness and the wide, almostly cloud-like kerning. Plus the gentleness of how he is drawing the balloons, which reminds me of the feminine drawing style of the red rose gals. Now and again he does run out of room with his lettering and that is an intellectual index of carelessness which could be intellectually interpreted as youthful. But I'm not sure if that is much of a contributor to the aesthetic tone established by the lettering on a consistent basis, without reference to intellectualized understanding. Regarding that Gonzales page, I'd be interested in what everybody else thinks about it. Anybody?

Laurence wrote: ...when you follow the frames in a comic book sequence the imagination is constantly 'filling in' the missing visual information / movement between static images. Imagining how the character might move from one position to the next etc. this is how comics / graphic novels work. so the drawings are never completely static in the mind. at least, they shouldn't be if the comic is any good. That's true for sequences of images Laurence, but not while reading the text in the speech bubble and looking at the single frame it accompanies. For me the sense of time evoked by the image sequences is somehow distinct, although related, to that while reading of the text bubbles. Re your 'acting' observation: I can agree that how the artist 'acts the scene' by way of drawing the character/s does make more vivid the glimpse we have of them when those metaphorical doors are momentarily opened and shut. But I can't honestly say this actually increases my belief that the words I hear coming from the other side of those doors are spoken by the characters.

Kev, regarding the Gonzales page I think the abstract background is ok but I don't like the city, it looks like a transparent layer that was put on top in Photoshop with a 45% Opacity blend. It does not feel as an integral part of the scene. I also don't think the shape of the balloons fits the mood of the scene, I'd prefer if their shapes would be a bit more rigid. And I would move the balloons more to the left (lets say at least half the width of the large balloon to the left).

Kev, I agree with Ales on the Gonzales page. I can only add that although the clouds are rather well done, the placement of speech bubbles for this kind of effect is nothing particularly special in this example. On the subject of hand-rendered text in the image, Ronald Searle's spikey, seismographic lettering at the bottom of his drawings works pretty seamlessly in my view.

Laurence John and Chris Bennett-- An interesting series of points. I agree about the importance of "the imagination... constantly 'filling in' the missing visual information / movement between static images." In fact, for me one of the joyful differences between movies and sequential art is that movies spoon feed you all the missing visual information while sequential art melds with the viewer's imagination. The viewer has to work to fill in the gaps and the artist has to be selective about choosing "the moments" to convey. (With sequential art, the pictures stand still so your brain has to move.) A.B. Frost was a master at this. Jack Kirby had it in his blood. And I find it interesting that in illustration (beginning in the 1950s) illustrators such as Austin Briggs (formerly a comic stip artist) deliberately selected off hand, in between moments for their static images so they wouldn't look staged and artificial the way Norman Rockwell's illustrations did. I agree with Chris Bennett that there is a moment, after you've landed from the previous panel but before you launch into the next panel, when you are dealing only with the dynamic between the text and the image in the one panel immediately in front of you, and I agree with his point for that moment. However, that strikes me as a narrow slice of the ongoing stream. As for Laurence John's point about "the quality of the 'acting'. how an artist makes a character appear to be alive, rather than just a well rendered figure study," I must say that in my opinion the quality of the acting in sequential art has declined dramatically as the text has become more ambitious over the years. Fans of popular and important graphic novels by artists such as Chris Ware have repeatedly tried to explain here that these images transcend "drawing" and are therefore it does not matter when they look like crap, but I was never able to buy into that argument. Kev Ferrara-- I think your description of McCay's word balloons was more attentive than mine, and I agree with what you say, although of course I have to distance myself from your phrase, the "gentleness of how he is drawing the balloons, which reminds me of the feminine drawing style of the red rose gals" (which in this day and age is just looking for trouble). As for your reaction to Gonzalez, I think this is a worthwhile discussion. Given your general antipathy for Rothko, Frankenthaler and those "color field" painters who offer us large, mottled or stained fields, and your affection for strong, deliberate compositions I would not expect you to warm naturally to a page such as this (although I thought the strength of the word balloons might redeem it). But I think this is a terrific page. It is the antithesis of the long tradition of brawny comic art panels where the central figure, the punch, the "big head" are always front and center. Wally Wood's famous "22 panels that always work" are the easy way out. For me, Gonzalez has chosen a more creative, less predictable and subtler path. The 80% of his panel that seems to be empty space is anything but empty. Far from " artistic exhaustion," the Gonzalez page strikes me as "artistic courage." If the Rembrandt analogy doesn't impress you, what about r.o. blechman, who places a slender drawing in the corner of a page to make you focus on a whisper. Finally, just to reinforce my reason for including the Gonzalez page to begin with: I am impressed by the way he uses speech balloons as the anchor for his composition. He doesn't use them to fill up the space, and he doesn't put them in the predictable location at the top of the drawing. He places them at the bottom and off to the side, where a modern artist might put high contrast, strong compositional elements that weren't word balloons.

David, my sensitivity regarding these aspects is probably low because I didn't grow up with comics and generally don't have much experience with them, so I'm just thinking out loud here -> why would balloons need all that attention on them? I imagine the most important aspects in a single frame is an image and text, while the purpose of the balloon is to deliver the text and occasionally express the mood of it (like those spiky balloons or colored balloons). I agree that the balloons have to be harmonically incorporated into the image and that they can also serve various design functions (decorative, or the way we read the narrative, etc), but after all that is accomplished the balloons should be aware that the world doesn't revolve around them. They are a necessary part of a harmonic whole but at the same time even If they are positioned in the middle of the image they should try and go by unnoticed. To me those Gonzales balloons seem like they want too much attention, It feels like other aspects of the image content are being subordinated to the graphic effect that the balloons perform in relation to the background.

But I think this is a terrific page. It is the antithesis of the long tradition of brawny comic art panels where the central figure, the punch, the "big head" are always front and center. Wally Wood's famous "22 panels that always work" are the easy way out. For me, Gonzalez has chosen a more creative, less predictable and subtler path. The very weakest way of defending anything is to attack its antithesis. In fact, false dichotomy is one of the standard-issue fallacies of argument. Don't we get enough of this as witnesses to the reductive stupefactions of political partisanship? The 80% of his panel that seems to be empty space is anything but empty. Far from " artistic exhaustion," the Gonzalez page strikes me as "artistic courage." John Byrne did scores of panels just like this during his 80s heyday. Its long been a stock solution. And one that is often used extensively by amateurs who don't yet understand that their readers aren't fooled by shortcuts. And anyone with insight into how the professional sausage gets made will know that sometimes comic writers will write such pages to give their artists a break. Particularly when deadlines loom. I've already praised Gonzales on this comment section before. I'm just dissenting on the value of this one page. although of course I have to distance myself from your phrase, the "gentleness of how he is drawing the balloons, which reminds me of the feminine drawing style of the red rose gals" (which in this day and age is just looking for trouble). Next time you pretend to be a friend of science, David, remind yourself that you essentially denied the existence and function of both androgens and estrogens in this conversation. I don't know if this is an example of Lysenkoism or just craven sociopolitical obsequiousness. But what I do know is that you just stood at attention and saluted to somebody.

Aleš wrote: "why would balloons need all that attention on them?" That's part of what I like about the Gonzalez page, Aleš. For 99.9% of the history of comics, balloons have been viewed as a necessary evil, for the reason you raise. They compete for space with the art, and artists are always looking for a place to stash balloons where they will perform their necessary function and yet interfere as little as possible with the art. It seems to me that Gonzalez reverses the old perspective. He looks at the balloons foremost as design shapes and uses them to perform a crucial visual role. Rather than looking for a place to hide the balloons, Gonzalez gives them a color and hard edge that make them the most striking elements on the page. Kev Ferrara wrote: "The very weakest way of defending anything is to attack its antithesis." This revelation will come as a blow to Plato, Hegel, Marx, Hindu philosophers and other great thinkers throughout history who have believed that pitting a thesis against an antithesis is the way thought progresses. "John Byrne did scores of panels just like this during his 80s heyday." I've never seen such a panel, or seen Byrne work in a medium that would permit such a soft field of values and achieve the effect I described to Ales, but I don't claim to be an expert on Byrne. If he did, good for him. "Next time you pretend to be a friend of science, David, remind yourself that you essentially denied the existence and function of both androgens and estrogens in this conversation." I don't recall denying the existence of androgen and estrogen. Surely that's not the same thing as suggesting that it can be dangerous to assert that "gals" draw in a "gentle" style? I know you don't believe my caution makes me an enemy of science, any more than your reaction makes you an enemy of humor. "

David, i really like that Gonzalez page but i think it's going a bit far to say the balloons 'perform a crucial visual role'. they're just one of many examples of similar looking balloons / boxes throughout his work which are placed on soft value panels. they're necessary, functional, tastefully placed, and suit his overall aesthetic, but they're not a crucial part of the image. i can imagine several other ways they could have been placed and the page would still 'work'.

This revelation will come as a blow to Plato, Hegel, Marx, Hindu philosophers and other great thinkers throughout history who have believed that pitting a thesis against an antithesis is the way thought progresses. What is this, The Daily Spin? What you were trying to do was prove (or at least bolster) the value of a thesis by attacking its antithesis. But Hegel's actual idea is that the transcending understanding, brought about by a merger of the thesis and the antithesis, is the advance in thought... aka the synthesis. And even this assumes that the issue is binary, which is its own fallacy of reason... If Pauly The Fixer's sworn enemy turns out to be a murderer, does that make Pauly The Fixer a hero? Of course not, because there's no direct forcing physical relationship there. This isn't physics. (I've never seen) Byrne work in a medium that would permit such a soft field of values and achieve the effect I described... Byrne did not use wash, that is true, but he still went for some vague field effects in his giant minimalist-desolation panels or pages. More to the point, I've seen many others since, influenced by Byrne (directly or indirectly), who have used wash media on similar panels. All these different iterations didn't look exactly precisely like the page we are talking about, but the general idea was the same. Regarding the beanbag-tossing of Rothko and Frankenthaler into the question... I just remembered seeing an experimental Jeff Jones comic page from a late 70s issue of Heavy Metal that posited the aesthetic question, "what would a comic book drawn by a color field painter look like?" Although the feeling was of dissipation, lacking narrative force as one moved from panel to panel, it was still a valid experiment. What we have here is not that. Surely that's not the same thing as suggesting that it can be dangerous to assert that "gals" draw in a "gentle" style? Hold on now. That's a different question. "Gals" may draw any way they like. The question is whether there is such a thing as a feminine drawing style. Or even, is there such a thing as femininity in general, which has certain characteristics commonly associated with it that includes; tactile sensitivity, sweetness, softness, gentleness, a kind of shy intimacy, a preference for tranquility over rancor, charm over force, and a love of decorative beauty. (All of which are associated with estrogenic compounds floating around in the body and brain long term) So, the great humorless question would be, are you reacting against the idea that there is such a thing as femininity? Against the idea that estrogenic compounds cause such personal and physical qualities or tendencies? Or are you just reacting against the "danger" of saying any of the above?

Laurence John-- If I ever had to bet which image, or which point, will create the most controversy in these posts, I would lose every single time. Who knew that the Gonzalez piece would trigger this much reaction? I did not intend to suggest that the Gonzalez panel was a unique and radical departure from other speech balloons. I agree with you that there are similar looking speech balloons out there. I only meant to say that I think it is a very strong example of how speech balloons can be incorporated into the "art" of the panel. A number of artists who paint soft value comics pages (such as Kent Williams, George Pratt, Muth) try to minimize the visual weight of the speech balloon, for example by abandoning the balloon altogether and writing the text on a light part of the background. I like that Gonzalez flipped that popular approach and made the balloons the hardest, most conspicuous elements in a very delicate (or as Kev would say, girlie)image. Kev Ferrara-- Well, at least Hegel and I are both guilty of fallacious reasoning. Perhaps he and I can seek consolation together in tankards of German beer, over a copy of the Phenomenology of the Mind. In the meantime, I don't know how you envision this magical "merger of the thesis and the antithesis" is supposed to achieve "the transcending understanding" without elements of the thesis and antithesis clashing and prevailing over each other. My view is (and calling it "spin" or "girlish" hasn't changed that view yet)that the vast majority of comic panels in history are muscular images designed to achieve what you call the "narrative force" to propel the story forward. I like that Gonzalez took the opposite approach here, and I think he did very well with it. We could have the traditional argument over Rothko (I am a fan, I gather you are not) but that would address only half the issue. I like the juxtaposition of the Rothko/quiescent color field decentralization against the hard edge of those word balloons. It seems to be more of a Rauschenberg look, or Jasper Johns. But anyway, it takes on the problem of the speech balloon by charging head on-- a nice combination of androgen and estrogen, if you will. My strategy for succeeding in this debate is not to persuade you on the substance, but rather to lure you into continuing to talk about the gentleness of the gals. One day, your mail will start coming back marked "return to sender, addressee unknown." But speaking of androgen and estrogen, if anyone has a copy of the Jeff Jones image that Kev described, I'd be very interested in seeing it.

David, in all seriousness, I'm flattered you are making an effort to engage here while so distracted. But if you happen to get a few free minutes in psychogenic clear, it really would be of interest to know if you think there is such a thing a femininity. Tinting me as retrogressive, however subtly, on the question while baldly avoiding sharing your own beliefs is not something to let pass without comment. So I'm "calling you out," as the gunslingers say... In your view, is there such a thing as femininity? I don't know how you envision this magical "merger of the thesis and the antithesis" is supposed to achieve "the transcending understanding" without elements of the thesis and antithesis clashing and prevailing over each other. I don't, of course. But that's not what you were doing. You asserted that what Gonzales was doing was good because he wasn't doing what Wally Wood was doing when Wally Wood was bad. If you want to claim this either-or reasoning as a species of Hegelian dialectic, you'll have to forgive me for ducking out for some air. And I would assert that indeed, Hegel's dialectical method, as useful a formulation as it is, is mired in linear modes of thought. The Jeff Jones I referenced is not an image, but a few page of continuity. The images are highly abstracted landscapes, if I am remembering correctly.

Oh, I actually hadn’t even noticed the gender difference with balloons in Asterios Polyp! :D I was talking about the interesting way in which he varies the shape of balloon and even typography of the text depending on the speaker, creating very rhythmic compositions even when the progression of the panels are linear. Similar to your John Cuneo example, probably on the more traditional cartooning end of things though.

Kev Ferrara wrote: "You asserted that what Gonzales was doing was good because he wasn't doing what Wally Wood was doing when Wally Wood was bad." Well, I suppose in a way I was doing that, but my point was that Wood catalogued a list of conventional solutions for comic artists-- solutions that have been rehashed a million times. I don't deny they are sensible, practical ways of using small boxes to advance a narrative. But the Gonzalez reached for a more unconventional solutions; he used a composition that Wood would have rejected as feeble. The reason I think it works for Gonzalez (apart from the half tone values, which Wood didn't have) is those stark white speech balloons. As I said, that could be a strong abstract expressionist composition. "In your view, is there such a thing as femininity?" Well, in a long history of odd topics on this blog, that one may be the farthest afield. I assure you that I love femininity; the world would be an unbearably poorer place without it. I also think that the role of yin has become richer and more complex as more potential has opened up for femininity. I was giving you a hard time because I was entertained by your use of the retro term, "gals." I know some "gals" who would eviscerate you like a capon if they thought you were being condescending to them. Bread-- That's a good example. It has been a while since I looked at Asterios Polyp. Thanks for sending me back that way.

my point was that Wood catalogued a list of conventional solutions for comic artists-- solutions that have been rehashed a million times. I don't deny they are sensible, practical ways of using small boxes to advance a narrative. But the Gonzalez reached for a more unconventional solutions; he used a composition that Wood would have rejected as feeble. As I've mentioned, given the last 30 years of explosive experimentation in the comic book medium, I don't agree that such a page constitutes an unconventional solution. Moreover, I think you might have a mistaken idea regarding Wood's 22 panels. For one thing, he never actually compiled those as some kind of teaching aid for aspiring comic artists. He didn't advocate for these panels in any sense. I believe those were cobbled together into a teaching sheet after his death. His reason for having these ideas set down at all was to remind himself to be less noodly because it was killing him in terms of his work flow. (You'll recall his rocco sci fi panels during his EC days.) The guy who actually cobbled together those panels and distributed it as a teaching sheet is the one who put the heading on there stating that these were stock solutions to use in order to get variety when dealing with boring script pages. The artists who would have gotten this sheet as a kind of directive to improve would not have been the average professional in the 1980s, but more the rookie freelancer or the so-so bullpen artist. I'm glad to hear you aren't in some kind of postmodernist-induced denial of the existence of femininity. You had me worried that you had been "gotten to" by the zombie hordes of correct thought (It's all been forcefed to us by the patriarchal hegemons, dontcha know?) I don't see how "gals" is condescending, in the same way I don't see how the idea of the Red Rose Girls' works having a feminine quality was worth singling out for "distancing." Having recently been knocked sideways by the acting in Carol, I would hardly be one to diminish in any way the strength of talent and artistic courage of differently-SRY-ed individuals.

You might be interested in the paintings of Mira Schor, who often uses word balloons (some with words, some without) as an important part of her compositions: http://www.miraschor.com/

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Creating Speech Balloons with Tools and Materials

Hello! My name is Liz Staley and I’m a long-time user of Clip Studio Paint (I started using the program back when it was known as Manga Studio 4!). I was a beta-tester on the Manga Studio 5 program and for Clip Studio Paint, and I have written three books and several video courses about the program. Many of you probably know my name from those books, in fact. I write weekly posts on Graphixly.com and on CSP Tips, so be sure to come back every week to learn more Clip Studio Tips and Tricks from me!

Having tools to make comic speech balloons was one of the features that sold me on Clip Studio Paint back when I first started using it. I still believe these are great time-saving tools for comic and manga artists, but also know that some artists have a hard time with using them. In this tutorial, I’ll cover a few different types of speech balloons and balloon tails you can easily make, including how to modify balloons to personalize them.

In this article we will cover the following topics:

Creating a Basic Speech Balloon

Modifying balloons using control points, using the balloon pen, balloon materials.

Let’s get started!

Let’s start off with a basic elliptical speech balloon. First, take the text tool and type out some text to put a balloon around. Then, select the Balloon tool (default keyboard shortcut - T) and from there select the “Ellipse Balloon” subtool.

In the Tool Property window, make sure that the circle is selected under the Figure option. We’ll talk more about some of the other options for this subtool in the next heading, for now we just want to make a simple oval speech balloon.

Use the Ellipse Balloon tool to draw around your text, as shown below. You don’t have to get it perfect on the first try, you can always resize and modify your balloon after this step!

Once you’ve drawn out your initial ellipse, Clip Studio Paint will use the current settings to fill in and outline the ellipse. The most common fill color for comics is white, with a black outline. But these options can be changed in the Tool Property window.

Now that we have our text circled in a balloon, let’s add a tail to show who’s talking! Select the Balloon Tail subtool in the Balloon window. Let’s take a quick look at the options for this tool, shown in the following screenshot.

The How To Bend dropdown contains three options for what kind of tail will be created. Straight line does exactly what it sounds like - creates a straight tail. The Spline option allows you to create curved tails (either one curve or, as we’ll see in a few sections, a tail with multiple curves!). The Polyline option allows you to create a straight tail that has sharp angles in it. We’ll be using that type of tail in the next section, so stay tuned.

The Width of Tail option controls the thickness of the tail at the start of it. Your tails will taper off to a point along the length of it, but the Width of Tail can make your tails look very different from each other! You may need to adjust this option a few times to find a setting you like for normal use.

Now that we’ve decided on a straight tail, let’s click and hold inside our speech balloon to start the tail. Drag without releasing the mouse button to pull out a preview outline of the balloon tail, shown below.

Once you position your tail the way you want it, release your mouse button to create the tail.

If you don’t get the balloon or tail perfect on the first shot, don’t worry. You can always resize the balloon using the control box around it (if you don’t see the control box, use the Object tool to click on the speech balloon to select it). Since speech balloons and tails are vector objects in CSP, you can also use the vector control point tools to modify them too, which is what we’re going to do in the next section!

Let’s go back to the Ellipse Balloon tool and take another look at the Tool Property window.

Line Color: Sets the color of the outline of the balloon. Choose from Main color, Sub color, or User color.

Fill Color: Sets the color of the inside of the balloon. Same options as above.

How to add: Controls how to add the balloon to the image. Add to Selected Layer will add the balloon to the current text layer and “attach” the balloon to the text. You can also set it to Create new layer, where the balloon is always created on a new layer.

Toning: Enabling this option creates the balloon with a dotted tone pattern.

Figure: Controls the shape of the balloon.

Brush size: Sets the width of the outline.

Anti-aliasing: Controls the amount of anti-aliasing for the balloon outline.

Brush shape: Sets the shape of the outline brush. You can create fun effects using the Brush Shape, like dashed outlines, heart outlines, lace, and more. Click the downward arrow to the right of this option to change the brush shape.

For the balloon we’re about to create, set the Figure option to the square. Then draw out a square around some text, like shown in the following image.

I want this balloon to look like a radio broadcast or like a robot voice, so that’s why I’m choosing a more angular font and a balloon with straight lines. I also want to add some spikes to the corners of this balloon for a more “broadcast” look. We can do this easily by adding some control points to the balloon!

To start, select the Correct Line tool and then the Control Point subtool. Then make sure the “Add Control Point” option from the Tool Property window. When you move this tool over the outline of the speech balloon, you should see a small red line appear in the middle of the outline and also see the existing control points light up.

For the look I want to achieve, I clicked three times on the line on each side of an existing corner to add six control points total. Then change the option in the Tool Property from Add control point to “Move control point” in order to grab and move points. Using this, I took every other point and moved them out to make three spikes on the corner of the rectangle.

Next I repeated this process of adding and moving control points for each corner of the balloon, as shown below.

Now we just need a balloon tail to show where our dialog is coming from! Select the Balloon Tail subtool and set the “How to bend” option to “Polyline”. Using this tool, click inside the balloon to start the tail, then go to another point and click again. Go to another point and click again to continue the line like you’re drawing a lightning bolt. When you get to the spot where you want your tail to end, double-click to end the tail.

Now we have a balloon that looks robotic! But what about a spooky or organic balloon? Read on to find out how to create those with the Balloon Pen!

The Balloon Pen allows us to create organic, hand drawn balloons. For the example in this article I’m going to be creating a “spooky” balloon, with a black fill color and white and red text over top.

Type out your text, then select the Balloon Pen subtool (under where you’d select the Ellipse balloon subtool!). Draw around the text and make sure to connect back to where you started. Again, don’t worry about making this perfect because we can clean it up using the control points.

Once you have your balloon drawn out, if you take a look at the control points you’ll see that there are a LOT of points. There’s far too many for us to even modify them easily!

That’s okay, because CSP has a handy tool that we can use to clean up these hand drawn vector lines. Select the Correct Line tool from the toolbar, then select the Simplify Vector Line subtool, shown in the following screenshot.

Now, take this tool and draw over the line that you drew with the Balloon Pen, making sure to get over all the control points. The tool will leave a green highlight, like shown below.

When you release the tool, the highlighted areas will be simplified. This means that CSP will remove the extraneous control points, making it easier to use the Control Point tool to add, delete, and move points around like we did in the previous example to perfect the shape of the balloon.

With the shape of the hand drawn balloon smoothed out, let’s add a balloon tail again. We’ve used the straight line and the polyline, so this time let’s use a Spline tail! I often use the Spline for simple balloons that just have one curve, but I think adding multiple bends adds a “creepy” or “whisper” look to the balloon.

To use the spline tail, click inside the balloon to start the tail. Go to the point where you want your tail to bend and click again to create a control point. Now go to another bend point and click again. In the screenshot below, each circle in the middle of my balloon tail is another point where I clicked to create a bend in the line.

When you get to the spot where you want your tail to end, double-click to create the tail. The fill and outline of the tail will automatically match the balloon it’s attached to.

In addition to the balloon creation tools, there are also special balloons that come loaded in the Materials library in CSP. You can find these balloons in the Materials library under Manga Material - Balloon. The screenshot below shows some of the balloons available in the Dialog folder of the Balloon materials.

There are lots of different shapes and effects of Balloon materials, including shouting, horror, whispering, and even balloons with colored decorative outlines that would look beautiful in shoujo manga!

Using these material balloons is very easy. Type out your text, then select the balloon you want to use. I’m going to use Jaggy_curve_03 for this example. Select the material to use to highlight it, then click on the “Paste selected material” icon at the bottom of the Material window to paste it or drag-and-drop the material to the canvas.

Material balloons don’t automatically attach to the text layers, so they may appear above your text at first, as shown above. Select the balloon layer in the Layer window and drag it below the text layer to reposition it so the words can be read.

Balloon materials are vectors, so they can be adjusted via control points just like the previous balloons we made! The image below shows the control points for the Jaggy Curve 03 balloon.

Use the Control Point tool to adjust the points and curves so that the balloon fits your text nicely. In the image below, I moved a few of the points slightly and adjusted a few curves so that the outline wasn’t so close to the text in a few spots, giving the text more “room to breathe”.

You can also add balloon tails to material balloons too using the Balloon tail tool that we explored earlier in this tutorial!

There are tons of options for speech balloons for your comic, and finding the one that matches the style and tone of your story is very important. It’s also important to know how the tools that help comic artists save time work so you can use them in your workflow!

For more information on CLIP Studio Paint, please visit https://www.clipstudio.net/en or https://graphixly.com

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How to Add Comic Book Speech Balloons and Text Bubbles to Your Photos

Common apps simplify the meme-ification of your favorite images

• St. Petersburg College

In This Article

Jump to a Section

Use a Meme Generator

Use microsoft paint, use photoshop, use libreoffice draw.

Perk up your photos by adding cartoon-style speech balloons. Common apps and online services simplify the process of adding a message to your favorite images.

Many online meme generators support speech or thought bubbles that overlay an uploaded or stock image. Services like SuperLame , for example, include more than one option for these bubbles.

Microsoft Paint on Windows 10 remains a free, reliable standby. The modern version of Paint includes built-in callouts for speech and thought bubbles. Just open your favorite image and drag a call-out on top of it, then add a text box overlaying the callout.

Adobe Photoshop isn't cheap — subscriptions to Creative Cloud can cost between $15 and $50 depending on your student status and what you elect to acquire — but this program is the gold standard for image editing.

Hover over the Rectangle tool to expose a callout, then from that submenu, select Custom Shape. Photoshop, in its default configuration, will open a menu above the image to support the Custom Shape tool.

Freehand-draw the shape or click the Shape drop-down to pick from nearly two dozen preinstalled shapes. Use the Custom Shape menu to add fill and stroke to the callout bubble and use the Text tool to add text and format text.

A part of the LibreOffice family, which is a competitor to Microsoft 365, LibreOffice Draw includes an easy-to-use drawing menu that supports dynamic resizing of callout boxes.

Open an image in LibreOffice Draw; then click View > Toolbars > Drawing . The callout menu in the Drawing toolbar reveals seven different callout templates. Click one then draw the callout over your image.

Click anchor points to adjust the callout. Use the yellow anchor to position the bubble near the relevant character's mouth. Type your message inside the thought bubble. No need to insert a special textbox overlay. Use the Properties menu on the right sidebar of the application window to modify the callout's character, paragraph, fill, transparency, shadow, and stroke.

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How Does The Speech Balloon Reflect The Effect Of Sharing Memories On Survivors?

The Power of Speech Balloons in Sharing Memories

Speech balloons have long been used as a visual tool in storytelling, particularly in comic books and graphic novels. These simple yet powerful devices allow characters to communicate their thoughts, emotions, and dialogue to the reader. However, speech balloons can also serve as a metaphorical representation of the effect of sharing memories on survivors.

When survivors of traumatic events come together to share their experiences, they often find solace and healing in the act of speaking and being heard. Just as speech balloons give characters a voice, survivors use their own words to express their pain, fears, and hopes. By sharing their memories, survivors can begin to process their trauma and find support from others who have had similar experiences.

The Emotional Impact of Sharing Memories

The symbolic representation of connection and support.

In comic books and graphic novels, speech balloons are not only a means of communication but also a symbol of connection and support. Characters often engage in dialogue, offering advice, comfort, or encouragement to one another. This sense of connection is mirrored in the act of survivors sharing their memories.

When survivors come together to share their experiences, they form a community of support. They can offer each other understanding, validation, and guidance. Just as characters in a story rely on speech balloons to communicate and connect, survivors rely on sharing their memories to build relationships and find strength in one another.

FAQs about the Effect of Sharing Memories on Survivors

How does the speech balloon reflect the effect of sharing memories on survivors.

The speech balloon is a visual representation of the survivor’s memories being shared and communicated. It reflects the impact of sharing memories on survivors by showing how their experiences and emotions are being expressed and acknowledged.

What are the benefits of sharing memories for survivors?

Sharing memories can provide a sense of validation and support for survivors, as well as help them process and make sense of their experiences. It can also foster a sense of connection and understanding with others who have gone through similar experiences.

How can survivors effectively share their memories?

Survivors can effectively share their memories through various means, such as storytelling, writing, art, or participating in support groups. It’s important for survivors to find a method of sharing that feels comfortable and empowering for them.

Are there any potential challenges or risks associated with sharing memories?

While sharing memories can be beneficial, it can also bring up difficult emotions and trigger trauma for survivors. It’s important for survivors to have a support system in place and to approach sharing memories at their own pace and comfort level.

How can others support survivors in sharing their memories?

Others can support survivors in sharing their memories by actively listening, providing a non-judgmental space, and offering empathy and validation. It’s important to respect the survivor’s boundaries and not pressure them to share more than they are comfortable with.

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Speech Balloon

• View history

During the first season of Sesame Street , several animated inserts were produced called Speech Balloon , [1] in which a character says a letter and a word that begins with that letter. The word appears in a word balloon, accompanied by an image.

According to the book Children and Television: Lessons from Sesame Street , these segments were inspired by the Muppet piece " Visual Thinking " as performed on The Ed Sullivan Show .

As part of the show's bilingual project, certain segments also aired on Sesame Street in Spanish.

Season 1 (1969-1970) [ ]

Later Seasons [ ]

Sources [ ]

• ↑ Lesser, Gerald Children and Television: Lessons from Sesame Street
• 1 Season 54 (2023-2024)
• 2 Maria and Luis fall in love and get married
• 3 Episode 5427

Dozens of Duke graduates walk out in protest of Jerry Seinfeld’s commencement speech

DURHAM, N.C. (Gray News) – Some students at Duke University walked out in protest during Jerry Seinfeld’s graduation speech on Sunday.

The students walked out in support of Palestine. Seinfeld has been vocal about his support of Israel during the war.

The Associated Press reported that about 30 of the 7,000 graduates left their seats and chanted “Free Palestine,” but an attendee who recorded video from the stands estimated it was closer to 200 students.

When Seinfeld took the stage to give his commencement speech, he was met with a mixed reaction from the crowd, hearing both cheers and boos.

The walk-out by graduates at Duke echoed weeks of protests at universities nationwide from Columbia in New York to UCLA. According to the Associated Press, nearly 2,900 arrets have been made at 57 colleges and universities.

Students protesting on college campuses are calling for their schools to cut ties with Israel and businesses that support it.

The war between Israel and Palestine started when organization Hamas attacked Israel and killed about 1,200 people on Oct. 7. The ensuing war has killed nearly 35,000 in Gaza, mostly women and children, according to Gaza’s Health Ministry.

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The Possible Collapse of the U.S. Home Insurance System

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Across the United States, more frequent extreme weather is starting to cause the home insurance market to buckle, even for those who have paid their premiums dutifully year after year.

Christopher Flavelle, a climate reporter, discusses a Times investigation into one of the most consequential effects of the changes.

On today’s episode

Christopher Flavelle , a climate change reporter for The New York Times.

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Christopher Flavelle contributed reporting.

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Category : Gorodok factory

Subcategories.

This category has only the following subcategory.

• Gorodok pipe bridge ‎ (7 F)

Media in category "Gorodok factory"

The following 41 files are in this category, out of 41 total.

• Factories in Pavlovsky Posad
• Gorodok (Pavlovsky Posad)
• 1900s architecture in Russia
• Weaving mills in Russia
• Brick architecture in Pavlovsky Posad
• Uses of Wikidata Infobox
• Uses of Wikidata Infobox with maps
• Pages with maps

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